Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Writer: Kim Cretors, 706/542-1168, kcretors@franklin.uga.edu
Contact: Susan C. Quinlan, 706/542-3161, susieq@uga.edu; Marjanne E. Goozé, 706/542-2450, mgooze@uga.edu

Cultural studies scholar Leo Spitzer to speak at UGA Chapel on Oct. 18

Athens, Ga. – Leo Spitzer, professor of history at Dartmouth College and Columbia University, will present a lecture titled “Photography, Memory and the Holocaust” on Wednesday, Oct. 18, at 3:30 p.m. in the University of Georgia Chapel. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on Latin America, Africa and the Jewish refugee experience. The lecture is free and open to the public; a reception in Moore College will follow.

Spitzer’s lecture reflects his current project, which addresses the reading of photographs from the Eastern European city of Czernowitz in Romania. He currently is working in collaboration with Marianne Hirsch on a new book, Czernowitz Crossroads: Four Jewish Families Before, During, and After the Holocaust.

Spitzer’s book Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism (1998) is both a memoir and a history of the Jewish refugee experience during the Third Reich. In it, he analyzes the snapshots and family photos taken by the refugees. “Powerful ‘points of memory,’ photographs signal a visceral connection to the past, carry its traces forward, and embody the very fractured process of its transmission,” says Spitzer. 

Susan C. Quinlan, associate professor of romance languages, and Marjanne E. Goozé, associate professor of Germanic and Slavic Studies, have invited Spitzer to UGA as a part of a team-taught course on the Jewish Diaspora in Brazil and Latin America. Spitzer will speak to the class on Oct. 19 about his experiences in Bolivia, where he was born.

“It will be fascinating to see how Spitzer’s work with private and other photographs has developed in this new project that reflects life in Czernowitz, an important center of Jewish life and culture before the Holocaust,” says Goozé. Quinlan adds that “because the class read Hotel Bolivia, we are very much looking forward to meeting Professor Spitzer and having him discuss his approaches to historiography and memory with the class.”

Spitzer is currently a visiting professor in the history department at Columbia University and the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor of History at Dartmouth College. In addition to Hotel Bolivia, he is the author of Lives in Between: Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil and West Africa (1990, The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses to Colonialism (Wisconsin 1974), and is co-editor with Mieke Bal and Jonathan Crewe of Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (1999).

Spitzer was the Lucius Littauer Fellow at the National Humanities Center (1992-93) and has been the recipient of John Simon Guggenheim, Ford, Social Science Research Council, Whiting, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Rockefeller Foundation awards and fellowships. In 1996-98, he was a National Humanities Center Distinguished Lecturer.

Spitzer’s visit is made possible through funding from the UGA President’s Venture Fund and Honors Program. The departments of Germanic and Slavic Studies, history, religion, and romance languages in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences have also contributed to the visit.

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