Meet Dr. Kathyrn Brackney, LJSA Member
Dr. Brackney is a modern European intellectual and cultural historian with a Ph.D. from Yale University. Before coming to Leiden, she held postdoctoral teaching posts in the History & Literature program at Harvard University and the Pozen Center for Human Rights at the University of Chicago.
Her current research explores how aesthetic norms have developed for remembering the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity. She teaches courses on the Holocaust, the history of human rights, and the development of global memory practices in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her forthcoming book, Surreal Geographies: A New History of Holocaust Consciousness (University of Wisconsin Press), recovers a forgotten, surreal tradition of Holocaust representation that was particularly common before the 1980s and still influences how we imagine the Holocaust and link it to other catastrophes. To learn more about her work, see the article “Remembering Planet Auschwitz During the Cold War,” in the journal Representations.
According to Dr. Brackney, “It is a privilege to be part of the LJSA, an important source of scholarly community at Leiden that is bringing together a dynamic, interdisciplinary group of students and faculty. I look forward in particular to working with colleagues who are also interested in questions of representation, memory, and the rebuilding of Jewish life after the Holocaust.”