Ackerman Chronicle
June 18, 2020 | Special Issue
Introducing our newest faculty member
Dr. Kerner's work examines the political dimensions of cultural transformations among migrants, refugees, and other transnational groups. In her current book project, Fragile Inheritance: The Fate of Yiddish in Argentina, she examines the local and transnational politics of Yiddish in twentieth-century Buenos Aires, before and after the Holocaust.
Her broader academic interests include global circulations and political communities between Europe and Latin America; histories and memories of political mass violence; and painting, photography, and film as arbiters of historical memory.
Dr. Kerner was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 2019-2020. She received her PhD in History from Brown University in 2019, and an MA/MSc in International and Global History from Columbia University and the London School of Economics in 2009. She previously worked for AMIGOS de las Americas supporting and directing summer youth leadership programs in Mexico, Honduras and Paraguay.
Fall 2020 Courses
Dr. Kerner is currently scheduled to teach two courses this fall, both of which are eligible for microgrants that will cover the cost of the textbooks for students who apply. See this call for applications for more information.
HIST 4359: Holocaust Memory in Latin America
How has the cultural memory of the Holocaust interacted with legacies and memories of other, local histories of state violence? How can we reconcile the global boom in Holocaust films, novels, and memorials with the relative obscurity of this topic in Latin America? In this course, we will ask when and how the history of the mass murder of Europe’s Jews entered the popular consciousness in places like Argentina, Mexico, and Guatemala, which have their own histories of traumatic violence. We will evaluate the much-discussed presence of Nazi war criminals in South America. And we will read about popular, political, and first-hand responses to the Nazi genocide from World War II to the present. Students will have the opportunity to work with open-access museum collections on-line for course credit.
HIST 4376: Modern Genocides Past and Present
What is genocide, and what are the contexts in which it unfolds? Can mass killing be arrested, and how? What are the challenges in bringing perpetrators to justice, and what are the legal structures and concepts that have been developed to do this? This course examines histories of racially and politically motivated mass killing in the twentieth century in relation to imperialism and colonialism, war, and political revolution. We will consider cases (German South Africa, Armenia, the Holocaust) that preceded the emergence of genocide as a legal category, as well as more recent and on-going cases (eg. Rwanda, Guatemala, and East Turkestan). In the second part of the course, we will explore intervention and prosecution, with special attention to the role of testimony and visual media in shaping international responses.
This issue was made possible by the following contributors:
Dr. Amy Kerner, Assistant Professor