Noah Shenker
I am a doctoral candidate in
Critical Studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic
Arts and the recipient of numerous fellowships including a USC Annenberg Graduate
Fellowship and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship in Archival Research from the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Below is a description of my graduate research on issues of Holocaust
testimony and trauma. If you would
like to contact me regarding your interest in this field of scholarship or your
experiences working with Holocaust survivors and how that might intersect with
my research, you may reach me at the email listed above.
My dissertation Embodied Memory: The Institutional and Cultural Practices
of Holocaust Testimony explores how
audiovisual recordings of interviews with Holocaust survivors are preserved for
interrelated purposes of commemoration, education, and social action, across
archives and museums in the United States.
In recent decades, archivists, curators, and academics have
faced a changing landscape in Holocaust commemoration marked by an increasing
absence of living survivors but a growing presence of their recorded and
archived stories. While scholars
and cultural critics have paid significant attention to the vast number of
archived Holocaust testimonies, there has been far less focus on how those
recordings have been shaped by individual, institutional, and formal
practices.
With that in mind, my research moves beyond considerations
of Holocaust testimonies as raw or unmediated sources by examining them in
terms of their media specificity and the ways they are structured and embodied
by particular institutional mandates, preferences, and policies. Ultimately, I argue that this
analytical approach helps inform strategies for transmitting testimony in
pedagogically, socially, and ethically constructive ways. This issue is increasingly pressing as
museums and archives attempt to harness testimonies to interventionist ends,
including efforts to merge Holocaust commemoration with campaigns to address
contemporary genocides in places like Darfur.
Central to my work is an engagement with scholarship
exploring the ethical dynamic of testimony, with the underlying notion that when
survivors share their stories, it constitutes an act of committing both
themselves and their accounts to others, who in turn bear witness to the act of
witnessing. However, I build on
that line of inquiry through an exploration of how testimonies are shaped by
institutions and their respective histories. How do archives and museums foster an ethical encounter
between interviewer, interviewee, and spectator across a changing landscape of
archival and exhibition formats?
In what ways can archived testimonies of the Holocaust be socially
transformative by training how we engage trauma and the suffering of
others? These and other questions
are the subject of my research.