Paul Jaskot | A Plan, A Testimony, and A Digital Map: Analyzing the Architecture of the Holocaust | University of Sydney

A Plan, A Testimony, and A Digital Map: Analyzing the Architecture of the Holocaust

The Power Institute and the Sydney Digital Humanities Research Group are pleased to present a lecture by Paul Jaskot, Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University. Taking an architectural plan and a specific survivor testimony as examples, Jaskot’s lecture will explore how recent methods in the Digital Humanities–particularly digital mapping–can be used to investigate plans and testimonies to raise new questions about the spatial and historical significance of the Holocaust.

About the Lecture 

The Holocaust was a profoundly spatial experience that involved not only the movement of millions of European Jews but also their confinement and murder in sites specifically built for the genocide. Paul Jaskot’s talk addresses how perpetrators thought of their building projects and, conversely, how victims experienced these oppressive spaces. Analyzing the architecture of the Holocaust helps us in understanding the larger development, implementation, and context of this crucial event. In addition to an architectural plan and a specific survivor testimony as examples, the lecture also explores how recent methods in the Digital Humanities—particularly digital mapping—can be used to investigate plans and testimonies to raise new questions about the architectural and historical significance of the Holocaust.

About the Speaker 

Paul Jaskot received his PhD in Art History from Northwestern University. He teaches courses on architectural history, modern architecture and urban planning, and German art with a particular emphasis on National Socialist Germany. In addition to his teaching, Jaskot is also the Director of the Wired! Lab for Digital Art History and Visual Culture at Duke. His scholarly work focuses on the political history of Nazi art and architecture as well as its postwar cultural impact. He is the author of The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (2000) as well as The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (2012). He has co-edited Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (2008) as well as New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory (forthcoming 2018). In addition, for the past decade, he has been a member of the Holocaust Geography Collaborative exploring the use of GIS and other digital methods to analyze the spatial history of the Holocaust.

DETAILS
Date:
6-7.30pm, 10 May, 2018
Venue: Philosophy Room S249, The Quadrangle, The University of Sydney, Camperdown Campus
For enquiries, contact: powerinstitute.events@sydney.edu.au

REGISTRATION
Free and open to all with registration via Eventbrite.

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