“Landscapes of Remembrance” April 17, 2023
On April 17th we marked Yom HaShoah with a public lecture by Professor Anne Knowles on “Landscapes of Remembrance.”
There are now thousands of Holocaust memorials around the world, from the vast grounds of former concentration camps to the palm-size “stumbling stones” that mark where individuals last lived before they were deported or killed. This presentation will reflect on the meanings memorials convey, asking how the Holocaust is remembered – and forgotten – in the landscapes where it took place.
Anne Kelly Knowles is McBride Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Maine, where she leads the Digital & Spatial History Lab. Her books include studies of 19th-century Welsh immigration to the United States and America’s struggle to compete with British industry, edited books on applying GIS to history, and the first book of essays exploring the Holocaust from geographical perspectives. She is known internationally as a pioneer in historical GIS and a leader of the spatial turn in Holocaust Studies. Anne’s research has been supported by many grants and fellowships, including interdisciplinary grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2012 her work was recognized by the first annual American Ingenuity Award for Historical Scholarship from Smithsonian magazine.