Professor James E. Young delivers the Museum's 2012 Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture. US Holocaust Memorial Museum
On October 4, 2012, James E. Young, Distinguished University Professor in English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, delivered the 2012 Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture, “From Berlin to Ground Zero: The Construction of a Memorial Vernacular.” Professor Young addressed how contemporary memorialization of tragic events has been influenced by Holocaust memorials.
Professor Young is currently completing an insider’s account of the World Trade Center memorial process, titled The Stages of Memory at Ground Zero: A Juror’s Report on the World Trade Center Memorial Process, which is based on his experience on the jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and books, including At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (2000); The Texture of Memory (1993), which won the National Jewish Book Award; and Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988), which won a Choice Outstanding Book Award. In 1997, he was appointed by the Berlin Senate to the five-member Findungskommission for Germany’s national Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which was dedicated in 2005, and he serves as a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Academic Committee.
The founding director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Professor Young has also taught at New York University, Bryn Mawr College, the University of Washington, Harvard University, and Princeton University.
The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture honors excellence in research on the Holocaust and fosters dissemination of important new Holocaust scholarship. Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff of Baltimore, Maryland, were active philanthropists in the United States and abroad, focusing especially on Jewish learning and scholarship, music, the arts, and humanitarian causes. Their children, Eleanor Katz and Harvey M. Meyerhoff, member and Chairman Emeritus of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, have endowed this lecture.
James E. Young
Distinguished University Professor in English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst
John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History, Professor of History, and Professor of German Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island
Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Codirector of the Center for European Studies at the University of North Carolina and Duke University, and Director of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Studien in Berlin-Potsdam
