Professor Erin McGlothlin

Professional Background

Professor Erin McGlothlin earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in German from the University of Virginia and her B.A. in German from the University of Texas, Austin. During her fellowship at the Museum, she was Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. For her Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies Fellowship, Professor McGlothlin conducted research on “Restoring the Story: Between Fiction and History in Contemporary Jewish Holocaust Literature.”

Professor McGlothlin is a scholar of modern German literature who has focused her work on Holocaust memory and post-Holocaust Jewish experience in postwar and contemporary literature. Her book Second Generation Holocaust Literature: Legacies of Survival and Perpetration (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006) examines the literary responses of the second generation, a group of writers who did not experience the Holocaust but nevertheless feel compelled to write about it. She is the author of several articles and book reviews on Holocaust literature and has presented her work in conferences around the world. Professor McGlothlin is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant to teach in Potsdam, Germany; a Faculty Fellowship at the Washington University Center for the Humanities; a Fulbright German Studies Seminar grant; a Washington University Faculty Award for the Study of Yiddish at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute; and an Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award from the University of Virginia. In 2003, she participated in the “Literature and the Holocaust” seminar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Fellowship Research

During her tenure at the Center, Professor McGlothlin focused on Holocaust literature written in the last 35 years by Jewish writers from Germany, France, Austria, and the United States. She explored how particular critics of Holocaust discourse have constructed the Holocaust as a sacred, unspeakable, ineffable event that lies outside the universe or history. Professor McGlothlin also examined how contemporary Jewish authors have responded to this notion of the Holocaust as sacred with texts that might be considered transgressive or blasphemous.

Professor McGlothlin was in residence at the Mandel Center from May 19 to August 18, 2006.