James E. Young

Keynote: Sunday, April 29, 2007 at 1:30 p.m. in 182 Lillis

James E. Young is Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he has taught since 1988, and currently Chair of the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies.  He has also taught at New York University as a Dorot Professor of English and Hebrew/Judaic Studies (1984-88), at Bryn Mawr College in the History of Religion, and at the University of Washington, Harvard University, and Princeton University as a visiting professor. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California in 1983.

Professor Young is the author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (1988), The Texture of Memory (Yale University Press, 1993), which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994, and At Memory's Edge:  After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (Yale University Press, 2000).  He was also the Guest Curator of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York City, entitled "The Art of Memory:  Holocaust Memorials in History" (March-August 1994, with venues in Berlin and Munich, September 1994-June 1995) and was the editor of The Art of Memory (Prestel Verlag, 1994), the exhibition catalogue for this show. 

In 1997, Professor Young was appointed by the Berlin Senate to the five-member Findungskommission for Germany's national "Memorial to Europe's Murdered Jews," under construction in Berlin.  He has also consulted with Argentina’s government on its memorial to the desaparacidos, as well as with numerous city agencies on their memorials and museums.  Most recently, he has been appointed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to the jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial competition, completed in January  2004.

His articles and reviews have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Representations, New Literary History, Partisan Review, The Yale Journal of Criticism, Annales, SAQ, History and Theory, Harvard Design Magazine, Jewish Social Studies, Contemporary Literature, History and Memory, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Forward, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Prooftexts, The Jewish Quarterly, Tikkun, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Slate, among dozens of other journals and collected volumes.  His books and articles have been published in German, French, Hebrew, Japanese, and Swedish editions. 

Professor Young is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, ACLS Fellowship, NEH Exhibition planning, implementation, and research grants, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Grants, an American Philosophical Society Grant, and a Yad Hanadiv Fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, among others.

In 2000, he was appointed as Editor-in-Chief of the Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, a ten-volume anthology of primary sources, documents, texts, and images, forthcoming with Yale University Press.  At present, he is completing an insider’s story of the World Trade Center Memorial, entitled Memory at Ground Zero: A Juror’s Report on the World Trade Center Site Memorial.

Keynote speaker: Sunday, April 29 at 1:30 p.m.
"The Stages of Memory and the Monument: From Berlin to New York"

In this slide presentation, I will examine the stages of memorialization as they have played out in design competitions in Berlin for Germany's national Holocaust memorial and in New York City for the World Trade Center Site Memorial. Here I will also look at how the vernacular of memorials has changed since the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, how the very idea of the memorial has evolved from icons of individual mourning to those of mass death.