The USC Shoah Foundation is shaping the inaugural programming for the Center for Media at Risk’s SummerCulture program during the summer of 2018. The two-week immersion course–Mediating Visual Memory of Conflict, War and Genocide in Berlin, Across the Holocaust and the Cold War—is being held May 28 – June 10, 2018 in Berlin, Germany and is co-taught by Barbie Zelizer of the Annenberg School for Communication and Marcus Funck of Technische Universitat Berlin.
For the duration of the course, the archives of the USC Shoah Foundation are being made available to a select group of PhD students, both from the Annenberg School for Communication and Technische Universitat Berlin, who will use them to direct personal research projects in Germany in connection with their dissertation topics. The ASC doctoral students who will be taking part in the program include Jennifer Henrichsen, Sanjay Jolly, Muira McCammon, Hanna Morris, Samantha Oliver and Celeste Wagner.
For this endeavor, Zelizer was named the 2017-2018 Rutman Teaching Fellow by the USC Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. The Rutman Teaching Fellowship, awarded to one University of Pennsylvania professor each year, provides funding for a course that integrates into its curriculum the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA), which has more than 55,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of genocide, including the Holocaust; the Rwandan, Armenian, Cambodian, and Guatemalan genocides; and the Nanjing Massacre in China.
Zelizer will use her fellowship to co-teach the graduate research seminar with on-campus sessions at the end of the spring 2018 semester and on location in Berlin during the summer. This accredited graduate course is among the inaugural activities of the Center for Media at Risk, directed by Zelizer.
