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Dr. Dorota Glowacka

Norman Raab Foundation Fellow
"America Is Our Hitler’: The Intersections of Jewish and Indigenous Cultural Memories of Genocide"

Professional Background

Dr. Glowacka is currently Professor of Humanities at the University of King’s College (Canada).  She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from State University of New York at Buffalo and an MA in English at the University of Wrocław (Poland). As the William J. Lowenberg Memorial Fellow on America, the Holocaust, and the Jews. Dr. Glowacka will be conducting research for her project entitled “‘America Is Our Hitler’: The Intersections of Jewish and Indigenous Cultural Memories of Genocide.”

Dr. Glowacka is fluent in English and Polish, has reading and speaking abilities in French, and can read Russian and German.

Dr. Glowacka is the author of Po tamtej stronie: świadectwo, afekt, wyobraźnia [From the Other Side: Testimony, Affect, Imagination] (Institute of Literary Studies, Polish Academy of Science, 2017) and Disappearing Traces: Holocaust Testimonials, Ethics and Aesthetics (Washington University Press, S. Weinstein Series in Holocaust Studies, 2012). She has co-edited two volumes, Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries [with Stephen Boos] (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002) and Imaginary Neighbors: Mediating Polish-Jewish Relations after the Holocaust [with Joanna Zylinska] (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2007). She is also the author of a number of articles, book chapters, reviews and encyclopedia entries. Some of her recent publications include “Gender and the Shoah: Relational Imagination and the Cul-de-sacs of Remembrance,” forthcoming in Lessons and Legacies, vol. 13 (2017), “The Archive and the Image: H.G. Adler's Snapshots of Traumatic History,” in H.G. Adler: Life, Literature, Legacy (Northwestern University Press, 2016), “Speech under Torture: Bearing Witness to the ‘Howl,’” in Trust in the World. Holocaust Scholars Reflect on Torture (University of Washington Press, 2016), “’Don’t leave me, pal’”: Witnessing Death in Semprún’s Buchenwald Narratives,” in A Critical Companion to Jorge Semprún (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), “Philosophy in the Feminine and the Holocaust Witness: Sarah Kofman and Hannah Arendt,” in Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust (University of Washington Press, 2014), and “In a Double Voice: Representations of the Holocaust in Polish Literature, 1980 – 2011,” in Holocaust as Active Memory - the Past in the Present (Ashgate Academic, 2013). She is also currently working on a book, with historian Atina Grossman, entitled Women and the Holocaust: Rewriting Gender in History and Memory (Bloomsbury Publications).

Fellowship Research

While in residence at the Mandel Center, Dr. Glowacka examined the intersections between the Holocaust and the experiences of the Indigenous peoples in North America, with a goal to discern how these two instances of atrocity and historical trauma illuminated each other. Some of her research questions included: the “uses” of the Holocaust by Indigenous scholars and activists (in the context of the recent Indigenous resurgence); the politics of gender in popular representations of the two histories (with focus on sexual violence on women); emergent communities of solidarity in the 2nd and 3rd generations (children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and of survivors of Indian Residential Schools); and the issue of “cultural genocide” at the intersections of the Holocaust and settler colonial genocide (the annihilation of language, culture and religious beliefs; cultural expropriation, “stolen art”). She researched the Museum’s various collections, including the written and oral testimonies of survivors, photographs and documentaries.

Dr. Glowacka was in residence at the Mandel Center until December 31, 2017.