Statuettes of Limitations: The 'Holocaust' in Oscar-Winning Films, 1945-1949 Seminar
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- Time:
- 18:00
- Date:
- 26 April 2016
- Venue:
- Lecture Theatre C Avenue Campus University of Southampton SO17 1BF
For more information regarding this seminar, please email The Parkes Institute at parkes@southampton.ac.uk .
Event details
Part of the Parkes Research Seminar Series 2015/2016. This seminar is co-sponsored by the Programme of Armenian Studies.
The Oscars constitute Hollywood's official recognition of which motion pictures are the most cinematically, critically, commercially or socially significant for the year of their release. An analysis of Holocaust-related films that won Oscars in the immediate postwar period reveals how they acknowledged the ordeal of European Jewry more visually than verbally and focused on the postwar crises the Holocaust created abroad like the plight of Displaced Persons, particularly children, the de-Nazification of West Germany and the implications for American society like discrediting domestic anti-Semitism and supporting the multilateral reconstruction of Europe as a way to avert another world war and the resurgence of Nazism.
Speaker information
Professor Lawrence Baron, San Diego State University. Professor Emeritus Lawrence Baron held the Nasatir Chair of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University from 1988 until 2012 and directed its Jewish Studies Program until 2006. He received his Ph.D. in modern European cultural and intellectual history from the University of Wisconsin where he studied with George L. Mosse. He taught at St. Lawrence University from 1975 until 1988. He has authored and edited four books including The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011) and Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005). He served as the historian and as an interviewer for Sam and Pearl Oliner’s The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. In 2006 he delivered the keynote address for Yad Vashem’s first conference devoted to Hollywood and the Holocaust. His contribution to Holocaust Studies was profiled in Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide (Routledge: 2010). In the fall Semester of 2015, he served as the Ida King Distinguished Visiting Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the Richard Stockton University of New Jersey.