Clark’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Asher Lecture Series, along with Lehigh University’s Berman Center for Jewish Studies and College of Arts and Sciences, are launching what they hope will become an annual event: a joint graduate conference that brings together students from both universities, along with others in the Boston area.
This week’s “Never Always Again” Graduate Workshop will feature lectures by well-known authors Molly Crabapple and Aleksandar Hemon.
“The idea for the graduate conference and bringing these two amazing speakers to campus is to give students an opportunity to think about their own work in interdisciplinary ways. Both Molly Crabapple and Aleksandar Hemon are thinking about history, but also from the perspective of graphic arts and literature,” says Frances Tanzer, Rose Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Culture, associate professor of history, and director of graduate study at the Strassler Center.
Tanzer has co-organized the conference with Professor Nitzan Lebovic, director of Lehigh’s Graduate Studies Program in History.
“We wanted to create an opportunity for students to meet each other and start to work together,” she adds.
Held in Higgins Lounge, Dana Commons, the talks are free and open to the community, but registration is required by emailing Alissa Duke at aduke@clarku.edu.
Tuesday, April 28, 4 p.m.
As part of the book launch for her New York Times-bestseller “Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund,” Crabapple, an artist and writer, will discuss “All Men Are Brothers: Bundist Resistance in Nazi-Occupied Poland.”
Her keynote lecture will be followed by a light reception and book signing, with her newest book available for purchase. After Clark, Crabapple heads to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco for her book tour.
Crabapple’s other books include “Drawing Blood” (2015) and “Brothers of the Gun: A Memoir of the Syrian War” (2018, with Marwan Hisham), a New York Times Notable Book that also was longlisted for a National Book Award.
Winner of the Bernhard Labor Journalism Award, she has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and other publications. Her animations have won two Emmys and an Edward R. Murrow Award. Her art is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art.
Wednesday, April 29, Noon
A professor of creative writing at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Hemon also is author of three collections of short stories:“The Question of Bruno”; “Nowhere Man,” which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and “Love and Obstacles.”
His other works include the nonfiction books “My Parents: An Introduction” and “The Book of My Lives”; the novel “The Making of Zombie Wars”; journalism, screenplays (including “The Matrix Revolutons”), and content for the Netflix original show “Sense8.”
Born in Sarajevo, Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004.
