The Evolving Memory of Argentina's "Disappeared"

Thursday, April 10
4:00p.m.
Northrop, Best Buy Theater



Speaker: Emilio Crenzel, Sociology, University of Buenos Aires
Response: Leigh Payne, Global Studies, University of Oxford and University of Minnesota

The panel sheds light on the most substantial transformations and the continuities in Argentina's social memory of its recent past and discusses the processes that led Argentina's Truth Commission Report Nunca Más (1984) to become the canonical way the disappearances and the country's political violence is publicly remembered, and how its meaning has been modified by new interpretations in the last two decades.

Other University of Minnesota faculty participants on the panel are Ana Forcinito (Spanish and Portuguese Studies) and Alejandro Baer (Director, CHGS).

Both panels are cosponsored by the Human Rights Program and the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

The Reframing Mass Violence Collaborative explores the particular developments and transnational entanglements of social memories in societies, revisiting their legacies of dictatorship, state terror, and grave human rights violations in Latin America and Southern Europe.

Carla Manzoni, PhD Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese to present at the next HGMV workshop

Argentina's Collages of Memory: Aesthetic heritage in post-dictatorial film Los Rubios (2003)
Holocaust, Genocide, Mass Violence Workshop
Thursday, March 13
3:00 p.m.
Room 609 Social Sciences



Los Rubios (The Blonds)
In 1977, when she was four years old, Albertina Carri's parents vanished without a trace, victims of Argentina's brutal military junta. In The Blonds, (or Los Rubios, her parents' nickname) the young Argentinian filmmaker travels with her crew across Buenos Aires to unravel the mystery of her parents' life, disappearance and death. Attacking the shifting projections of memory from many fronts, Carri enlists an actor, her parents' comrades, fading photographs and happy Playmobil* dolls to investigate complicated questions of identity and responsibility.

Carla Manzoni was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is currently a PhD candidate (A.B.D since April, 27. 2012) at the Spanish and Portuguese Department, University of Minnesota. She holds a MA in Hispanic and Lusophonic Literatures and Cultures at the same university and previous studies in her native Argentina in Public Relations (undergraduate) and Communication Management (post-graduate).

Carla has worked in political communication, diverse media -such as TV, radio and film- and cultural non-for-profits. She is currently working on her dissertation as wells as on her conservation project which attempts to create an archive of unedited Latin American independent videoart and experimental audiovisual.

For information on the workshop and future presentations please click here.

To particpate please contact Wahutu Siguru at siguru@umn.edu.

Special Screening The Act of Killing

Theatrical Cut July 31, 7:30 p.m. Walker Art Center
Director's Cut August 1, 7:00 p.m. Walker Art Center
Conversation with director Joshuah Oppenheimer August 3, 12:00 p.m. Walker Art Center

In this chilling and inventive documentary, filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer examines Indonesia's communist purge of 1965, in which more than one million leftists, intellectuals, and ethnic Chinese were killed. Leaders of the death squads continue to be celebrated as heroes, and the director challenged them to reenact their real-life killings in the style of the American movies that inspired their methods. The result is a cinematic fever dream, an unsettling journey deep into the imaginations of mass murderers and the shockingly banal regime of corruption and impunity they inhabit.

For more information on tickets and screenings please contact the Walker Art Center.

Mass Murder? Gee, That Was Fun 'Act of Killing' Re-enacts Indonesian Massacres: NY Times Movie Review

Eric Harkleroad PhD Candidate in Anthropology to Present at CHGS Workshop

Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence Studies
Thursday, May 9
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
710 Social Sciences

Eric Harkleroad will present "Warfare and Society: Archaeology's Contribution to the Discussion."

Eric's research focuses on situating warfare within the social sphere to examine its changing place in the daily life of Iron Age people in Southern Britain. His dissertation takes a regional look at how warfare, or the symbolic representations of warfare, is distributed across the landscape at different sites and how this changes through time. The work he is presenting uses a different scale focusing on one site and trying to understand how warfare fits into society at one specific site. Additionally he will address the relevance of Anthropology and Archaeology to the interests of the HGMV workshop.

This the last workshop of the 2012-2013 school year. The workshop will resume in September of 2013. For more information on how you can participate next year please email Alejandro Baer at abaer@umn.edu.

Special thanks to Shannon Golden for facilitating and organizing the workshops this year.

Visiting Professor Jaime Ginzburg to Present at CHGS Workshop

Interdisciplinary Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence Studies

Friday, December 14
12:00-1:30 p.m.
Room 614 Social Sciences Building



"Authoritarianism, Violence and Melancholy"

Professor Ginsberg's presentation is about language and violence. The first part, will focus on torture, considering how different social groups talk about it (considering examples from Brazil and Uruguay). There is a variety of perspectives, including the ways physicians describe it, and the point of view of victims. The Second part will feature a comparison between Hegel and Adorno,dedicated to representation. Aesthetics, Cultural Studies and Literary Theory have important contributions to studies on violence. Consideration will be given to those theroies and more specifically ideas from the Frankfurt School. The last part will be about death, loss and melancholy. It`s necessary to discuss images of death, in a way we can define how cultural production, in authoritarian regimes along the XXth Century, can speak against repression and violence.

Professor Jaime Ginzburg is Associate Professor of Brazilian Literature at the University of São Paulo, in Brazil, and is currently a Visiting Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, where he is teaching a graduate seminar on Violence and Democracy. His latest books include, Crítica em tempos de violência. São Paulo: Edusp / Fapesp 2012; Escritas da violência, co-edited with Márcio Seligmann-Silva and Francisco Foot Hardman (Rio de Janeiro: Sette Letras, 2012), Vols. I and II; and Walter Benjamin: rastro, aura e história, co-edited with Sabrina Sedlmayer. Belo Horizonte: Editora UFMG, 2012.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop please contact Shannon Golden golde118@umn.edu.

Meeting Schedule 11-20-2012.pdf

CHGS to offer Interdisciplinary Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty

Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence Studies
Interdisciplinary Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Room 710, Social Sciences Building
12:00 p.m. - 2:00 p.m.

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS), the Human Rights Program and the Department of Sociology are organizing a Research Workshop for Graduate Students and Faculty Members of all departments in the Humanities and Social Sciences at University of Minnesota.


The objectives of the workshop are to:

1. Foster interdisciplinary conversations on the subject areas of Holocaust studies, genocide and memory, peace and conflict studies, human rights, nationalism and ethnic violence, representations of violence and trauma, conflict resolution, transitional justice, historical consciousness and collective memory.


2. Support fellow scholars and provide feedback at various stages of the research process.


3. Engage in dialogue with invited scholars.

If you are interested in participating in the workshop but cannot attend the preliminary meeting, please contact the organizers to express your interest.
The workshops are being organized by Professor Alejandro Baer, director of CHGS, and Shannon Golden, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Sociology.
For more information on the workshop please contact Shannon Golden at golde118@umn.edu.

Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities

On August 4, President Obama announced two important steps to prevent mass atrocities: the creation of a standing inter-agency Atrocities Prevention Board and a proclamation barring serious human rights violators from entering the United States.

PRESIDENTIAL STUDY DIRECTIVE/PSD-10