Start of Main Content

2022 Virtual Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar: Bioethics, Disease, and the Holocaust

Application
Jewish nurses and nursing students gather around a cart outside a coffee house on the designated Judenstrasse during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, circa 1940–42. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Clara Renee Keren Vromen

Jewish nurses and nursing students gather around a cart outside a coffee house on the designated Judenstrasse during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, circa 1940–42. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Clara Renee Keren Vromen

The 2022 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar probes the history of bioethics, pathology, disease, and the Holocaust. Drawing on an interdisciplinary body of scholarship, the Seminar underscores how the history of the Holocaust informs the fields of bioethics and public health, and vice-versa, addressing questions such as: What are the legacies of the Nazis’ uses and abuses of scientific knowledge to serve ideological purposes? How can we understand the continued significance of the Nuremberg Trials and the Nuremberg Code? And what ethical lessons does the Holocaust provide when it comes to practicing medicine and considering public health concerns today, including treating vulnerable patient populations and ensuring access to treatment and vaccines? The Seminar will provide faculty with a range of interdisciplinary methods, approaches, and pedagogical tools for introducing this aspect of Holocaust studies into undergraduate and graduate classrooms.

Seminar Facilitators
Patricia Heberer Rice, PhD, Senior Historian, Director of the Division of the Senior Historian, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH, FACP, Director, Center for Bioethics and Humanities, University of Colorado; Professor, University of Colorado School of Medicine and Colorado School of Public Health

This Seminar will occur online through a combination of synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Seminar applicants must teach or anticipate teaching relevant courses at accredited institutions in North America. This includes colleges, universities, and community colleges.

Applications must be received in electronic form no later than November 12, 2021.

For questions regarding the application process, please contact kwhite@ushmm.org.

This Seminar is endowed by Edward and David Hess in memory of their parents, Jack and Anita Hess, who believed passionately in the power of education to overcome racial and religious prejudice.

APPLY NOW