JST 474Hiroshima & the Holocaust in History and Memory

3 credits · Jewish Studies · Penn State

The history and memory of the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often taught separately in different disciplines. This course will examine them together through the various ways different societies remembered, understood and commemorated these. Using the extensive literature on the history of memory, this course further suggests ways in which these memories and histories affected and were entangled by each other. Specific content will vary according to individual instructor, but topics may include victim cultures, cold war nuclear history, trauma, human rights, dark tourism, memorials, architecture as well as the general impact of these tragedies on the fraught politics of memory in East Asia and the Middle East, or the way the memories of the tragedies were entangled with the civil rights and other struggles in American and global history.