News-Board-Eintrag:
Professor Dr. Leora Auslander (Senior Research Fellow)
| News-Kategorie: | |
| Eingestellt von: | Elisa Antz |
| Eingestellt am: | 24.03.2009 |
 Prof Auslander finished her Studies in History in 1982 at Harvard University and received her PhD in 1988 at Brown University. Since then, she has held several Professorships at the University of Chicago. She currently holds a chair in history as well as two chairs in committees for Jewish Studies and history of culture. In 1996, she founded the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Chicago, which she chaired until 1999. Professor Auslander published numerous monographs as well as articles and organised various conferences on race and gender studies. Her current research project focuses on ”Strangers at Home: Jewish Parisians and Berliners in the Twentieth Century“. She investigates images of ’Home’ and ‘Belonging’ as well as those of strangeness in French and German metropolises. Professor Auslander is interested in the activities of the Research Areas Visual Culture, Culture and Identities as well as Political and Transnational Cultures. In this newsletter, Professor Auslander tells how her multi-facetted research, especially her current project focussing on ”Strangers at Home: Jewish Parisians and Berliners in the Twentieth Century“ fits in and adds to the research at the GCSC.Prof Auslander’s recent research on the meanings of “home” relate to the GCSC“My research is intrinsically interdisciplinary and I found there to be an extraordinarily good fit between a number of the research areas and my intellectual preoccupations. I therefore thought that a stay at the GCSC would be productive and exciting. More specifically, my project, entitled ’Strangers at Home: Parisian and Berlin Jews in the 20th century’ focuses on the question of the meanings of “home” as constructed by the French and German states in the 20th century as well as how inhabitants – particularly Jews -- of those two polities understood and lived their at-homeness (or its absence). Perhaps paradoxically, a study focusing on the concept and experience of ’home’ cannot be contained within any one disciplinary or subdisciplinary location. Home is necessarily simultaneously political, social, emotional, and material. I investigate conditions for political belonging (citizenship and naturalization) through national state archives, academic and legal treatises on the topic, and newspaper reporting on changes in the law. The social framing of home – neighborhoods, restaurants, food stores, synagogues, political organizations, clubs, schools – are researched with the tools of social history including police records, telephone books and other directories, records of synagogues, schools and associations, and memoirs. The affective meanings of home may be found in photograph albums, memoirs, novels, letters, and naturalization and restitution petitions. Finally the material manifestations of home may be found through inventories of the contents of homes, wills, photographs, novels, films and memoirs. Written, visual, material, and oral sources are all used. ‘Strangers at Home’, therefore, both builds upon and transcends current work by historians, anthropologists, and political scientists on the dynamics of citizenship, national and minority identities, and culture in twentieth-century Europe and should, I hope, be of interest to a number of different scholars at the GCSC. I have also done, in connection with this project, considerable work on the French and German memory work on the Shoah of the last thirty years. Professor Auslander’s interest in the research areas“The research areas on ‘Memory Cultures’ and ‘Culture and Identities’ are an especially good fit with my interests, but those on ‘Visual Culture’ and ‘Political and Transnational Culture(s)’ are also highly relevant. “ Presently known dates of Prof Auslander’s teaching activities:Prof Auslander will hold her workshop on ”Things: The theory and practice of material culture” on 2 July 2009 . She will be giving her keynote lecture on 2 June 2009 at 6 pm on ”Commemorating Death, Obscuring life? The Conundrums of Memorialization“. Further information and online application forms can be found on our homepage. |
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