The Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Violence (HGMV) Interdisciplinary Graduate Group continues to be a thriving community of graduate students, faculty and visiting scholars. This year, we decided to split the time between two speakers, to more accurately reflect presentation lengths in conferences, and to still be able to provide thoughtful feedback. We had a total of 20 presenters – the largest number to date!

We started off the year welcoming everyone back from the summer by sharing information about HGMV funding and other professional development opportunities. Our first speaker, Maria Jesus Fernandez, a CHGS visiting scholar, started us off with a fascinating talk on translations of Anne Frank into Spanish. Throughout the year, we were also visited by captivating scholars and educators, such as Jodi Elowitz who led a timely training session on how to teach about right-wing extremism, Carlo Tognato who argued for a civil pedagogy of solidarity for highly polarized societies, and Martha Stroud, who gave an engaging account of the lingering stigma after the 1965 killings in Indonesia, followed by a training session on how to use the Genocide Survivor Testimonies at the USC Shoah Foundation. Our student speakers came from 8 different departments throughout the University of Minnesota, and covered a wide range of topics, including Holocaust education, an analysis of Peruvian cinema and the genocide in Indonesia and . Students presented work in various stages, and they deployed a variety of interdisciplinary qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

HGMV is an opportunity for graduate students to share case studies, theories and methods in a collaborative environment with peers. It is a unique space in its interdisciplinary reach, challenging each presenter to think outside the box and to clearly articulate their ideas across the seemingly rigid boundaries of disciplines!

Interested in submitting your own work? Contact the 2018-19 HGMV coordinator, Brooke Chambers, for more information or to get on the schedule.

Miray Philips is a Ph.D. student in Sociology where she studies narratives of violence and suffering, collective memory, and knowledge production on conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. Miray was the 2016-17 Badzin Fellow.