Trauma, Remembrance and Compassion

The KHC has served as a national demonstration site for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) since 2011. This recognition showcases the KHC as a cultural center that provides programs and offerings which positively impact QCC’s humanities curriculum and shares that information on a national level. For more information, click here.

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What is trauma? What does it mean to remember? What is compassion? This year’s colloquium explores trauma, both historically and in our contemporary culture, and how remembrance and compassion both have and continue to offer meaningful responses to atrocities. If genocide and incarceration are crimes and practices that silence people and remove their humanity from them, then remembering is an act of restoration. By preserving the stories of those who have been dehumanized, we honor their suffering and affirm their humanity. In this colloquium, we explore remembrance as a social action that speaks back to the destructiveness and dehumanization of trauma. We also explore how to meaningfully engage with trauma, to hold space for and learn from past traumas. Finally, we seek to identify ways to respond to trauma through compassion, to consider how in the face of traumas, we can choose to act deliberately to alleviate suffering. Organized in dialogue with contemporary issues, the series is aligned with the current KHC exhibit, The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide.

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Spring 2023 KHC-NEH Virtual Events

All events are free and open to the public but registration is required.
They are also being recorded so be sure to check back for the viewing links.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Deconstructing Atrocity Imagery: A Conversation with Dr. Wendy Lower
Recorded on February 8, 2023
Click here to watch the recorded event

Join Dr. Wendy Lower, Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, for a timely conversation about the impact that both historical and contemporary atrocity imagery and traumatic videos have upon our collective psyche. Dr. Lower shares insights from her latest book, The Ravine: A Family: A Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, detailing her investigation of a single photograph—a rare “action shot” documenting the horrific final moment of a family’s murder in Ukraine—which led to new details about the Nazis’ open-air massacres in eastern Europe and a rare case of rescue and postwar justice. The conversation was moderated by Dr. Kathleen Wentrack, Professor and Chair of the Art and Design Department at Queensborough Community College.

KHC-NEH Workshop
Teaching The Beauty in Breaking: A Workshop for Educators
Recorded on February 15, 2023
Click here to watch the recorded event

Join Queensborough Community College (QCC) professors Dr. Angela Ridinger-Dotterman and Dr. Ilse Schrynemakers as they share pedagogical strategies for integrating the KHC’s Nazi Concentration Camps virtual and in-person exhibition into the teaching of this year’s QCC Common Read text, The Beauty in Breaking by Dr. Michelle Harper. Harper, an ER surgeon, shares her memories from inside the emergency room and her own spiritual journey towards healing from trauma. All college faculty and staff are invited to attend and learn ways to bring even the smallest parts of this memoir into the post-pandemic college classroom. 

KHC-NEH Lecture
Surviving the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan: Sohaila Kakar’s Refugee Journey
Recorded on February 22, 2023
Click here to watch the recorded event

In Afghanistan, Sohaila Kakar was a practicing surgeon; then, in 2021, the Taliban regained control over the country. Join us as Sohaila discusses life before and after the Taliban’s takeover in Afghanistan–and the physical, economic, and psychological toll it had upon her family as they fled. Her story also highlights the compassionate work done by Upwardly Global, the non-profit agency that provided guidance to Sohaila’s family as they settled in the U.S.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Dramatic Engagement: The Arts and Holocaust Education
Recorded on March 15, 2023
Click here to watch the recorded event

Join Dr. Janet Rubin, Assistant Professor in the Departments of Visual and Performing Arts, Humanities, and Speech at Eastern Florida State College, as she demonstrates how the power of theater can be harnessed within the classroom to encourage a deeper understanding of the Holocaust while directly connecting students with survivors. Dr. Rubin provides methodologies and resources on teaching about this tragic historical event through performance.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Wartime Cabaret: Remaking Theatre from a Jewish Ghetto
Recorded on April 26, 2023
Click here to watch the recorded event

In 2017, two teams of artists from Australia and South Africa reimagined a cabaret created in 1943 by Jewish prisoners in the wartime ghetto at Terezín (Theresienstadt) in Czechoslovakia. Using video from both performances, Dr. Lisa Peschel, Associate Professor in Theatre at the University of York, shows how the artists used the archival traces of the original script to bring Terezín’s past into our present while engaging with deeply felt contemporary concerns.

KHC-NEH Workshop
“Just Like Me:” Embracing Our Common Humanity with Self-Compassion
Recorded on April 28, 2023
Click here to watch the recorded event

Join Laura Banks, Certified Compassion Cultivation Training Instructor, for an exploration into how we can bear witness and respond to our own and others’ suffering with increased courage and care. During this workshop, Banks will discuss different strategies and practices for translating our healing from personal and collective trauma into positive action.

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Fall 2022 KHC-NEH Event Recordings

KHC-NEH Lecture
Trauma in Digital Spaces: The Future of Holocaust Remembrance
Recorded on September 21, 2022
Click here for the recorded event

What are the complexities of remembering the Holocaust through contemporary technologies? How can digital spaces facilitate compassionate responses to trauma and loss? Dr. Rachel Baum, Deputy Director of the Sam & Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, looks at the themes of the year – trauma, remembrance, and compassion – through contemporary technologies (including holograms of Holocaust survivors and virtual reality experiences of memorial sites).

KHC-NEH Lecture
The Digitization of Genocide Memory: Consequences and Contestation
Recorded on September 28, 2022
Click here for the recorded event

Join us as Dr. David J. Simon, Director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, discusses the memorialization of mass atrocities and genocide across a vast array of digital technologies, including both academic settings and unexpected virtual spaces like Minecraft, YouTube, and TikTok. What are the opportunities for remembrance that are made possible in these diverse spaces? And what are the potential hazards of memorializing mass atrocities and genocide in them? 

KHC-NEH Workshop
Pedagogical Approaches for the KHC’s “Concentration Camps” Exhibit
Recorded on October 19, 2022
Click here to watch the recorded event

In this workshop, Dr. Cary Lane, Associate Professor at QCC in the English Department, highlights ways instructors can incorporate content and themes from the KHC’s newest original exhibition, The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide. Dr. Lane also introduces faculty and docents to curatorial choices made in the exhibit and how those can connect to thematic teaching.

KHC-NEH Lecture
Exploring Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese-American
Recorded on October 26, 2022
Click here to watch the recorded event

Join us for a conversation with Laura Gao, author and illustrator of Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese-American, who discusses their own experiences around the themes of trauma, remembrance, and compassion. What are some things that inspired the creation of Messy Roots, and how might readers be able to draw inspiration from Gao’s journey and story as presented in her debut graphic memoir?

KHC-NEH Lecture
Legacies of Genocide: Mauthausen and its Memorialization
Recorded on November 2, 2022
Click here to watch the recorded event

Do we have an ethical responsibility toward “violated spaces” like those of a former concentration camp? What legacy do such spaces create for us? And how might cultural differences alter our perceptions of the memorial in our 21^st-century? Dr. Rebecca Rovit, Associate Professor of Theatre at the University of Kansas, explores Mauthausen as a site of remembrance connected to violence that permeated Austrian soil.

KHC-NEH Workshop
Mindfulness and Meditation: Towards a Compassionate Self
Recorded on November 16, 2022
Please email KHC@qcc.cuny.edu for the link

Are you stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed? Do you want to learn how to practice mindfulness and meditation to slow down? Join QCC Professors Alison Cimino, Lecturer of English, and Dr. Joanne Chang, Professor of Music, in this workshop as they help us to deepen awareness, mindfulness, and compassion for self and others, especially during stressful and busy times.

KHC-NEH Workshop
Imagining Possibilities: Social Practice as a Pedagogy of Care
Recorded on November 18, 2022
Please email KHC@qcc.cuny.edu for the link

In this workshop, artist-researchers Heather Huggins, Assistant Professor of Theatre at Queensborough Community College (QCC), and Dr. Tania Alice, Professor of Performance Art at Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro, share social practices at the intersection of performance and mindfulness, along with concrete examples from their research applying these practices in their campus communities.