Prof. Hunt receives EU Center grant and affiliation for her GER 199 CHP class: The Holocaust and Discourse of Human Rights, which she is currently teaching for the Campus Honors Program.
World War II (1939-1945) marked a dramatic shift in how international communities think about trauma and remember war and other catastrophic events. Focus moved from honoring heroes on the battlefield to honoring victims, a transition described as "the ethical turn in memory culture," or memory politics. Trauma—whether man-made or natural—and our collective response to it has become central to present-day politics and to the discourse on human rights. This course refers to the Holocaust (1941-1945) as foundational to modern memory politics. Although Germany is not the first country to perpetrate genocide, discussions in and about Germany have been crucial to political and cultural attempts around the globe to honor victims, to weigh testimony and witnessing properly, and to figure out how to respond to trauma without engaging in "competition" among different victimized groups. The class centers the experiences of four minority groups in US culture and their transnational connection to Germany: Jewish exiles and survivors in the U.S. after the Holocaust, homosexual exiles and survivors, disability studies activists and artists, and activists of the Afro-German movement. At the end of the semester, students will understand the modern history of thinking about human rights and will be conversant in central issues around human rights, memory politics, and trauma response. They will be well-prepared to think further about these issues in potential future work in graduate school, with non-profit or governmental organizations, and in any number of other contexts. This course will fulfil the General Education requirements in Cultural Studies: U.S. Minority Cultures, and in Humanities and the Arts: Literature and the Arts.