Overview
Workshop Dates: June 14–18, 2027
Workshop Location: EHESS and Memorial de la Shoah, Paris
Organized by: Sarah Gruszka (EHESS) and Marie Moutier-Bitan (University of Caen)
Applications are invited for the H-Diaries workshop “Holocaust Diaries: Analytical Approaches to a Multifaceted Corpus,” to be held at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris from June 14 to 18, 2027.
The workshop builds on the Franco-German ANR-DFG research project H-Diaries – “The First Testimonies of the Holocaust Written by Jewish Victims: Analysis, Inventory, Mapping,” conducted jointly by the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ), the Centre de recherches historiques at the EHESS-CNRS, and the Chair of Excellence in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Caen Normandy. The workshop is supported by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).
By summer 2027, H-Diaries will have significantly advanced its transnational inventory of Holocaust diaries, opening new possibilities for their systematic and comparative study. Bringing together members of the H-Diaries team and scholars working on diaries and related first-person sources, the workshop will address a central methodological question: How can researchers analyze Holocaust diaries as a corpus while preserving the historical specificity, materiality, and intimacy of individual testimonies?
Background and significance
Holocaust diaries occupy a distinctive place within Holocaust historiography. Written during persecution, hiding, internment, deportation, forced displacement, and mass violence, they provide exceptional access to experiences, emotions, perceptions, forms of knowledge, and practices of writing as events unfolded.
Despite their importance, scholarship has often concentrated on individual diaries or relatively small groups of texts. The growing identification and description of diaries preserved across different countries, archives, and languages now makes it possible to consider them not only as singular testimonies but also as a transnational and multilingual corpus.
The workshop will explore the methodological possibilities opened by this shift in scale, while critically examining its limits. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which archival histories, preservation practices, postwar migration, publication, digitization, and institutional collecting have shaped the corpus available to researchers today.
Drawing in particular on materials preserved by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, including collections connected with the Save Their Stories initiative, participants will consider the transnational trajectories through which Holocaust diaries were preserved, transmitted, donated, published, and made accessible. A comparative working session at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris will offer an opportunity to examine another major collection of Holocaust diaries and to reflect on how different institutional and archival histories shape both the constitution of the corpus and its interpretation.
Objectives
The workshop seeks to:
establish an international forum for scholars working on Holocaust diaries;
assess the possibilities and limitations of corpus-based approaches;
foster dialogue between close reading, archival research, comparative history, and digital methods;
develop a shared methodological vocabulary for analyzing Holocaust diaries across institutional, linguistic, and national contexts;
strengthen connections between researchers and institutions preserving Holocaust diaries;
encourage future collaborations between scholars, archives, and digital humanities initiatives.
More broadly, the workshop aims to contribute to the development of an international research network devoted to the comparative study of Holocaust diaries and to stimulate new forms of collaboration around their preservation, description, contextualization, and analysis.
Workshop Themes
The workshop will be organized around three interconnected areas of inquiry.
1. Epistemology, Archival Practices, and Ethics
How are corpora of Holocaust diaries constituted? What has been preserved, collected, digitized, catalogued, published, or lost?
This strand will examine collection histories, archival practices, institutional and historiographical biases, as well as ethical questions surrounding privacy, digitization, access, and the scholarly use of intimate writings.
2. Diarists, Languages, and Forms
How can researchers reconstruct the trajectories of diarists and of the documents themselves? How should we approach the linguistic, material, and formal diversity of Holocaust diaries?
Participants will consider multilingualism, translation, writing practices, manuscript materiality, chronology, genre, and the changing contexts in which diaries were written, preserved, and subsequently transmitted.
3. From Individual Testimony to Corpus Analysis
How can scholars move between the close reading of individual diaries and broader comparative approaches?
This strand will explore the possibilities and limitations of corpus-based analysis, including comparative reading, spatial analysis, mapping, databases, and other digital humanities methods. Particular attention will be paid to the methodological tensions between aggregation and singularity, and between large-scale patterns and individual experience.
Who Should Apply?
We welcome applications from scholars whose research engages with Holocaust diaries, wartime Jewish writings, first-person sources, testimony, archival history, materiality, multilingual corpora, spatial approaches, or digital humanities methods relevant to the study of Holocaust sources.
Applicants may work on individual diaries, specific collections, particular geographical or linguistic contexts, or broader comparative and methodological questions. Projects need not be directly connected to H-Diaries.
The workshop is conceived as an intensive and collaborative forum. Participants will be expected to engage actively with the work of other members of the group and to contribute to collective methodological discussions across disciplinary, linguistic, and national boundaries.
Application Details
Applicants are invited to submit:
a short curriculum vitae (max. 2 pages);
a brief description of their current research project and its relevance to the workshop (max. 500 words);
a short statement explaining what they hope to contribute to and gain from the workshop (max. 200 words).
Applications should be submitted in English by December 1st, 2026 to holocaustdiaries@gmail.com.
Applicants will be notified of the outcome by early January 2027.
The organizers will cover the costs of economy-class travel from participants’ home institutions to Paris, as well as lodging and meals for the duration of the workshop.
Workshop Coordination Committee
Sarah Gruszka, EHESS Marie Moutier-Bitan, University of Caen Anna Ullrich, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum