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Virtual PhD and a Cup of Tea: Overt-covert recounting: deconstructing women’s personal memory narratives of sexual violence during the Holocaust
May 19, 2021 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Part of The Wiener Holocaust Library’s PhD and a Cup of Tea doctoral seminar series.
Eyewitness account by Janka Galambos entitled ‘Forced Women Labourer for the Argus Aeroplane Works in Berlin-Reinickendorf’. Testifying to the Truth, Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.
Drawing on survivor interviews housed in the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, this presentation will highlight a range of ways in which Jewish women recount their first-hand memories of sexual(ised) violence during the Holocaust within a public Holocaust ‘testimony’ sharing context. In particular, the talk will explore the vocabulary employed by the women so as to communicate their story of assault to an interviewer (and implied audience) and consider how an ‘overt-covert’ narrative may be conceptualised as a form of protective ‘sideways’ storytelling. How do women encode stories of sexual assault in the act of recounting them? What thematic vehicles emerge when ‘speaking private memory to public power’ (Theresa de Langis, 2018)? How may a researcher de-code them?
Please note this talk will contain graphic descriptions of sexual assault.
About the speaker:
Lauren Cantillon is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries at King’s College London. Her research explores the ways in which Jewish women recount personal memory narratives of sexual(ised) violence during the Holocaust. She is the 2020/21 Katz Research Fellowship in Genocide Studies at the USC Shoah Foundation Centre for Advanced Genocide Research and a volunteer for the Wiener Holocaust Library. Her work on emotional regimes of memory and cultural production will feature in Covid-19, the Second World War and the Idea of Britishness (forthcoming, 2021).
Event guidelines:
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