This event is part of the Art and Testimony Webinar Series 2024 co-hosted by the University of Victoria’s Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives project and the UBC-V Public Humanities Hub.
“Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives” is an international project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada under the title “Visual Storytelling and Graphic Art in Genocide and Human Rights Education” (SSHRC Partnership Grant; 2022-2029).
In this program, Dr. Henry “Hank” Greenspan, an internationally renowned Holocaust scholar and award-winning playwright, will discuss how and why his research and teaching became intertwined with his work as a theatre artist. What underlies both is the discipline of sustained attentiveness in the service of empathy, imagination, and deepening conversation. More succinctly, Hank says, “It’s all about the schmooze.”
Hosted by Dr. Charlotte Schallié, Professor and Chair of Germanic and Slavic Studies at the University of Victoria, and Dr. Andrea Webb, Associate Professor of Teaching, UBC Curriculum & Pedagogy.
Thursday, January 25, 2024
9:00-10:30 AM Pacific Time
Online via Zoom
Speaker Bio
Dr. Henry “Hank” Greenspan is a psychologist, oral historian, and playwright, emeritus at the University of Michigan. The core of his work is fifty years of sustained conversation with a group of Holocaust survivors. Rather than single “testimonies,” Greenspan met with the same survivors multiple times over months, years, and—with some survivors—decades. This work is most fully described in his book, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony.
His best-known play, also based on decades of deepening conversation with survivors, is REMNANTS. First produced for radio and broadcast on National Public Radio in the U.S., REMNANTS has since been performed on more than three hundred stages worldwide. Venues include the John Houseman Theatre in New York, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the New British Library in London, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Magdeburg Attic Theatre in the former Terezin camp, a space used for performance during the Holocaust itself.
For more detail, see https://www.henrygreenspan.com