2025: Kathryn Brackney, “Surreal Geographies: A New History of Holocaust Consciousness”

September 15, 2025

Kathryn Brackney, Surreal Geographies: A New History of Holocaust Consciousness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2024).

College of Charleston Mosse Lecture
mosselectures.wisc.edu/charleston

Monday, 15 September 2025, 11:30 CST

Zoom

Chair: Chad S.A. Gibbs (College of Charleston)
Comment: Sheer Ganor (University of Minnesota)

Sponsored by:
Global Mosse Lecture Series
George L. Mosse Program in History
The Mosse Foundation
Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies at the College of Charleston
UW–Madison Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies
UW–Madison Center for German & European Studies

Lecture Description: Surreal Geographies recovers a forgotten archive of Holocaust representation. Examining art, literature, and film produced from the immediate postwar period up to the present moment, Kathryn L. Brackney investigates changing portrayals of Jewish victims and survivors. In so doing, she demonstrates that the Holocaust has been understood not only through the documentary realism and postmodern fragmentation familiar to scholars but also through a surreal mode of meaning making. From an otherworldly “Planet Auschwitz” to the spare, intimate spaces of documentary interviews, Brackney shows that the humanity of victims has been produced, undermined, and guaranteed through evolving scripts for acknowledging and mourning mass violence.

Kathryn Brackney is Assistant Professor of History at Leiden University. Her current research explores how aesthetic norms have developed for remembering the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity. She teaches courses in modern European intellectual and cultural history. Before coming to Leiden, she taught at the Pozen Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago and Harvard College’s History & Literature Program. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University.

Sheer Ganor is a historian of German-speaking Jewry and modern Germany. Her work focuses on the nexus of forced migration, memory and cultural identities. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled “In Scattered Formation: Displacement, Alignment and the German-Jewish Diaspora.” This study traces the emergence of a transnational diasporic network of Jewish refugees who escaped Nazi Germany and its annexed territories. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota, Sheer held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the German Historical Institute. She has published in the Journal of Contemporary History, the German Historical Institute Bulletin Supplement and others. Her research has been supported by a variety of institutions, including the Central European History Society and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes.

Chad S.A. Gibbs is a historian of the Holocaust, antisemitism, and war and society. His work is devoted to understanding the timing, choices, and tactics of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. Chad makes extensive use of oral history sources and practices both inside and outside the classroom. In that area, he holds ongoing positions as an Affiliated Researcher at the USC-Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and a Scholar Interviewer with the USC Shoah Foundation.