Cultural Legacies of the Holocaust: Race and Human Rights from Nazi Germany to Today

Date: June 2-6, 2025

Location: Evansville, Indiana

Focusing on the systematic denial of human rights in Nazi Germany and the United States this program considers how the lessons and legacies of the Holocaust can–and do–inform contemporary life and illuminate the dangers of antisemitism, ultranationalism, and racism today.

Participants will:

  • Explore African American and Holocaust museums to analyze the difficult and conflictual process of representing and memorializing the past
  • Gain the ability to show similarities and differences between Nazi Germany and the Jim Crow South. This helps US students understand that Nazi beliefs and actions were not outliers.
  • Gain a richer understanding of media use in teaching about the Holocaust, but also the wider impacts that Holocaust related media have on current understandings of events.
  • Leave with a toolbox of activities, ideas, and lesson plans to engage students in meaningful encounters with the Holocaust and human rights issues. The student-centered lesson ideas we will model will additionally bolster student critical thinking skills and literacy across a variety of mediums, offering suggestions on how to engage students meaningfully through music, comics, art, photography, and even museum spaces.

In partnership with the University of Southern Indiana College of Liberal Arts, Evansville African American Museum, Evansville Wartime Museum, and CYPRESS.

Leaders

  • Oana Popescu-Sandu

    Dr. Oana Popescu-Sandu is a Professor and Chair of the English Department at USI. Her undergraduate degree is from the University of Bucharest, Romania, M.Phil. from Central European University, and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Illinois. Her research currently focuses on English language literature by Eastern European transnational authors after 1989, analyzing issues of identity and immigration, translation and translingualism. While Oana’s main specialization is in World Literature, she has taught classes in academic writing, literary theory, women’s writing, and global studies. She attended the TOLI seminar in 2015 and the leadership retreat in 2019. She was awarded the Jack and Anita Hess Follow-up Grant at the USHMM, Washington, DC in 2014 after attending the seminar in 2013.

  • Alexandra Natoli

    Dr. Alexandra Natoli is an upstate New Yorker who received her PhD in French from the University of Virginia in 2016 and has been working at the University of Southern Indiana since 2019. Currently, Alexandra serves as Assistant Professor of French and Director of Global Studies; she also chairs the college’s Interdisciplinary Committee. Being a Holocaust educator and researcher is vital to Alexandra’s scholarly identity. She is a former Mandel fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and has been honored to participate in workshops and conferences held by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Warsaw’s POLIN Museum, the USHMM, the Holocaust Education Foundation, and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, among others.

  • Todd Schroer

    Dr. Todd Schroer is chair of the Criminal Justice department at USI. His degrees are in Sociology from the University of Nebraska and UC-Santa Barbara. The majority of his work has focused on the white supremacist movement and their tactics. He came to study the Holocaust through a focus on Holocaust Denial, a big issue within organized white supremacy, and currently has been looking at the overlap between US and Nazi eugenic views and racial laws, and the role of the criminal justice system in the Shoah. Todd attended TOLI in 2017, two Belfer Conferences and one Silberman Seminar at the USHMM, and the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University’s Summer Institute among other related pedagogical or research focused conferences. He currently teaches an introductory course on the Holocaust, and courses on hate groups and hate crimes, domestic terrorism, and drugs, among other criminology related topics.