2026 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar

Call for Applications

Seminar Dates: January 5-9, 2026 Applications must be received electronically no later than Friday, October 31, 2025. Please contact Campus Outreach Programs (campusoutreach@ushmm.org) with any questions.

Overview

The 2026 Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar explores interdisciplinary approaches for incorporating Holocaust survivor testimonies into the college classroom. While foregrounding audiovisual interviews, this seminar will examine various forms of survivor testimonies to consider what kinds of questions they can and cannot answer about Holocaust history and memory. Together, we will discuss approaches for introducing students to how testimonies can illuminate everyday experiences of the Holocaust across a diverse range of linguistic, geographic, religious, and gendered contexts. We will also reflect on how survivor testimonies are shaped by the institutional cultures and approaches of their respective archives, including those at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and the USC Shoah Foundation. Finally, we will discuss how the digital turn in Holocaust testimony, including the use of AI technology, shapes how students engage with testimonies as we transition to a period in which survivors will no longer be present to provide the ethical anchorage for how their recorded testimonies are used.

Themes we will consider include:

• The history, definitions, and conventions of Holocaust testimony

• Navigating testimonies across institutional collections

• Topics relating to Jewish and non-Jewish victims’ experiences of the Holocaust and Nazi persecution

• Triangulating audiovisual sources with other types of sources

• AI technology and the future of teaching with Holocaust testimony

The 2026 Hess Seminar is designed to help faculty, instructors, and advanced PhD candidates currently teaching or preparing to teach courses that focus on or have a curricular component relating to the Holocaust. Applications are welcome from instructors across academic disciplines, including but not limited to:

• Anthropology

• Communication

• Cultural Studies

• Digital History

• Disability Studies

• Film and Media Studies

• Gender Studies

• German Studies

• History

• Holocaust and Genocide Studies

• Jewish Studies

• Literature

• Museum Studies

• Philosophy

• Political Science

• Psychology

• Sociology

• Theology and Religious Studies, and

• World Languages and Cultures.

Drawing on interdisciplinary methods, the seminar aims to provide faculty with new approaches for integrating Holocaust testimony into college-level curricula.

Seminar Facilitators

Richard Lutjens, Associate Professor of Modern Germany, Department of History, Texas Tech University

Richard Lutjens specializes in modern German history with a focus on the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He is the author of Submerged on the Surface: The Not-so-Hidden Jews of Nazi Berlin, 1941–1945 (Berghahn Books, 2019), which examines the daily experiences of life in hiding for the 1,700 Berlin Jews who survived the Holocaust by fleeing deportation and living in the shadows of the capital of Nazi Germany. Through an examination of survivor testimony spanning the decades (both written and oral), his research argues for a reexamination of hiding as a category of Holocaust analysis, demonstrating that contrary to popular opinion Jews in Berlin did not hide in the traditional sense of the word but were constantly on the move and actively engaged in securing their own survival. His current research project focuses on the role played by perpetrators of so-called “ordinary crime” in the exploitation of Jewish Germans in the years from the Nazi seizure of power until the end of the last major deportations from Germany in March 1943. Lutjens held the Mandel Center’s Takiff Family Foundation Fellowship from 2010 to 2011.

Noah Shenker, Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Film and Media Studies, Colgate University

Noah Shenker’s research and teaching traverse Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Jewish Studies, and Film and Media Studies. He is the author of Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Indiana University Press, 2015), which looks at three of the most extensive and distinctive archives of Holocaust testimony in the world: the USC Shoah Foundation, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Organized within a comparative framework, it demonstrates how testimonies should not be understood as raw sources, but as mediated and embodied texts shaped by the encounter between witnesses and their interviewers, as well as the institutional and technical practices marking the testimony process. His current book project, Beyond the Era of the Witness: The Afterlives of Holocaust Testimonies, examines how archives and museums are experimenting with interactive media to address the passing of the Holocaust survivor generation. He has published portions of that project, including "Digital Testimony and the Future of Witnessing” (2020) and “Pinchas-DiT: Simulation and the Imagined Future of Holocaust Survivor Memory” (with Dan Leopard in 2024). Shenker held the Mandel Center’s Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship from 2006 to 2007.

Application Details

Seminar applicants can be at any career stage but must be teaching or anticipate teaching relevant courses at accredited institutions in North America, including colleges, universities, and community colleges. Applications must include:

1. A curriculum vitae;

2. A one- to two-page statement outlining how the seminar will strengthen the candidate’s teaching in the areas of Holocaust studies, oral history methods, or other related fields (required components are outlined below);

3. A draft syllabus with content relating to the Hess Seminar topic that the candidate has taught or anticipates teaching.

In your statement of interest, please specifically address:

• How the seminar would augment or impact the course(s) you anticipate teaching;

• How the seminar would help to meet your institution's needs and/or expand your institution’s curricular offerings;

• How your scholarly perspective, teaching experiences, and/or disciplinary approach will enhance the seminar discussions.

This seminar aims to convene scholars from various career levels, disciplines, regional locations, academic institutions, and backgrounds. Participants must commit to attending the entire seminar. All assigned readings and course materials will be made available to participants in advance of the program. After the conclusion of the seminar, participants are expected to submit a preliminary version of a revised syllabus. The seminar will include designated working sessions for participants to revise and expand their syllabi content using Museum resources.

Travel and Lodging

For non-local participants, the Mandel Center will cover the cost of (1) direct economy travel to and from the participant’s home institution and Washington, DC, and (2) lodging for the duration of the seminar. All participants will be provided $250 to defray the cost of meals and incidentals.

Deadline

Applications must be received electronically no later than Friday, October 31, 2025.

Applications from all qualified individuals will be considered without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, or any other protected status. Please contact campusoutreach@ushmm.org with any questions.

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.