Join the Franklin Humanities Institute for its Friday morning faculty speaker series, tgiFHI! On Friday January 14, the series will feature Paul B. Jaskot, Professor of Art History and German Studies, Co-Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab, and Chair of the Art, Art History & Visual Studies Department.

Using Digital Methods to Analyze Humanities Sources: The Case of Nazi-Occupied Krakow
Paul B. Jaskot
9:30 – 11 a.m. EDT
Fri, Jan. 14, 2022

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Please join the Franklin Humanities Institute for its Friday morning series, tgiFHI! tgiFHI gives Duke faculty in the humanities, interpretative social sciences and arts the opportunity to present their current research to their departmental (and interdepartmental) colleagues, students, and other interlocutors in their fields. See Spring 2022 series schedule and registration links here >>

Talk description:

This presentation takes on one of the fundamental questions of Holocaust Studies argument by rethinking the “integrated approach” to perpetrator and victim histories. On the one hand, the paper will explore and examine perpetrator sources, including how the history of the occupation of Krakow intersected with labor and ghettoization policy within the regional Distrikt Krakow as well as in the larger Ghetto “system” as a whole. Such a macro approach, however, will be contrasted with a micro study that foregrounds both the Nazi administration’s presence throughout the spaces of occupied Krakow as well as the Jewish experience of the ghetto itself. The potential of analog and digital methods for getting to these histories will be highlighted. In particular, the presentation will argue for an “intersecting history” rather than an integrated one as fundamental to thinking through the historical analysis of perpetrators and Jewish victims in occupied Krakow. In this case, the importance of the built environment comes to the fore as a crucial cultural and political economic locus of these interesting histories. Spatial approaches that incorporate historical sources, iterative digital methods, and an attention to the ambiguity of analog evidence help model an approach to Holocaust Studies and architectural history that extends existing paradigms in decidedly new ways.

Speaker bio:

Paul B. Jaskot is Professor of Art History and German Studies, Co-Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab, and chair of the Art, Art History & Visual Studies Department. His work focuses on the relationship between architecture and politics in modern Germany, with a specific emphasis on the National Socialist period. He has also worked widely on the promotion of Digital Art History as a scholarly area. He is the author, editor, and co-author of multiple articles and books on these topics including, among others, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (2012) as author and New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory (2018) as co-editor. In addition, Jaskot is a founding member of the Holocaust Geography Collaborative, an international collective of scholars working on how digital mapping and other computational methods help us to advance questions concerning the genocide of the European Jews.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, the Department of German Studies, and the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab.