Professor Daniel Magilow from the University of Tennessee and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will be on campus Feb. 16 to give a talk entitled "Counting to Six Million: Collecting Projects and Holocaust Memorialization."
The Holocaust is the genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s during World War II. About six million men, women and children were put to death in Nazi concentration camps. More than sixty years later, people around the world still commemorate this tragedy through various ways and events designed specifically for this memorial. One of those ways is the collection and accumulation of six million of a particular object, as a symbol for the six million Jews who were the victims of the Holocaust. This object can be a button, a paper butterfly, a penny, a shoe or a soft drink pull tab.
Professor Magilow will describe those efforts and projects to memorialize the Holocaust and will talk about a particularly interesting and inspiring one: The Children’s Holocaust Memorial in Whitwell, Tennessee, for which students collected millions and millions of paper clips. In his talk, Professor Magilow will also closely consider all the aspects related to this way of commemorating the Holocaust, including its historical facts, its pedagogic values and its theoretical issues.
Magilow earned a B.A. in Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Princeton University in 2003.
His research and teaching interests include photography and literature, media theory, German-Jewish Studies, Weimar Germany and the Third Reich. He is currently working on a manuscript about photographically-illustrated books of 1920's Germany and another about photographs of Jews before and after the Holocaust.
Dr. Magilow is spending the academic year 2005-2006 at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Study as the center's Pearl Resnick Postdoctoral Fellow.
His visit is sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Wabash College and by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. His talk is scheduled at 4:15 p,m., Feb. 16, in Detchon International Hall. Everyone is invited. Professor Magilow will be also visiting classes at Wabash and at South Montgomery High School.
Labaki is a Wabash College sophomore from Baabdate - El Metn, Lebanon.