Course designed to permit regular and visiting faculty the flexibility to address topics that reflect their research interests and supplement regular curricular offerings. Consult department website each semester for specific descriptions.

Holocaust museums have become over the past years, one of the most popular mediums of Holocaust commemoration. This course will explore the history, exhibitions, and design of various Holocaust museums around the world, and study their social, cultural and political agendas. This examination will reveal their role and responsibility in Holocaust commemoration. In order to understand the museum mechanism and the ways in which it constructs social agendas and memory, we will begin the course by studying the history of museums from ancient history to the present. This history will explain how museum exhibitions have changed from displaying treasures to disseminating ideas, strengthening national or community identity, and constructing memory of historical events. We will then study the development of Holocaust museums, from the first museum that was built on a remote kibbutz in Israel, through the establishment of prominent National museums, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. We will examine the process that led to the museums’ foundation, the social and political motives behind them, and their exhibitions, architecture and design.

Lectures will be delivered synchronously but will be recorded for later viewing.

Repeat Rules