Crossing Europe via Flickr
Oral History, Genocide Studies, and Diasporic History
The Herero Speaking Apartheid Refugees and the Shanghai Jews
On the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Dr. Elise Pape and Prof. Kevin Ostoyich will discuss the importance of oral testimonies in telling lesser-known histories within genocide studies. Pape and Ostoyich have conducted dozens of interviews of the Herero and Shanghai Jews, respectively. Together they explore such questions as: How have the interviewees transmitted their experience of genocide or that of their ancestors over generations? What meaning(s) do the individuals detect in their experience as refugees? How do these individuals view current efforts to commemorate the genocide and/or refugee history of which they or their ancestors were a part?
Prof. Kevin Ostoyich was a Visiting Fellow at AGI during the summers of 2017 and 2018 and is currently a Non-Resident Fellow. He is Professor of History at Valparaiso University, where he served as the chair of the history department from 2015 to 2019 and is presently the recipient of the Dixon W. and Herta E. Benz Fund for Faculty Support. He holds his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Prior to moving to Valparaiso, he taught at the University of Montana. He has served as a Research Associate at the Harvard Business School and an Erasmus Fellow at the University of Notre Dame. He currently is an associate of the Center for East Asian Studies of the University of Chicago, a board member of the Sino-Judaic Institute, an inaugural member of the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum International Advisory Board, and a board member of CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center. He has published on German migration, German-American history, historical pedagogy, the Holocaust, and the Shanghai Jews.
Dr. Elise Pape was a DAAD/AGI Research Fellow in July and August 2017. Specialized in the field of sociology of migration and of (post)colonial memories in Cameroon, France, Germany, and Namibia, she currently works as a researcher at the University of Strasbourg in the project “Migreval: A Biographical Evaluation of Policies that Concern Migrants in Strasbourg and Frankfurt”. In the past, she has worked at the University of Strasbourg as assistant professor, and as a postdoctoral researcher at the EHESS (Paris), at the Goethe University in Frankfurt and has been a visiting fellow at the Center Marc Bloch (Berlin).
This webinar will convene via Zoom. Please contact Elizabeth Caruth at ecaruth@aicgs.org with any questions.
This event is generously supported by the AGI Harry & Helen Gray Culture and Politics Program
