Dr. Costello is Helping Pilot a New Digital Resource at Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
Dr. Lisa A. Costello is helping to pilot a new digital resource housed at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in an original course in Writing and Linguistics called “Writing Autobiography Post-Holocaust: Gender, Memory, and History” (fall 2015). Georgia Southern is one of approximately 20 universities nationally that are participating in this pilot project. She was chosen by competitive competition to be amongst the initial trial group of six teaching faculty. This web resource is a digital extension and reconception of the Jewish Responses to Persecution project. This groundbreaking series produced by the Mandel Center “embeds translated, annotated, and contextualized contemporary Jewish sources into a general historical narrative of the Holocaust. The aim of the series is to rectify the imbalance between use of perpetrator and victim sources in scholarship on the Holocaust, and point to the amazing range of Jewish documents that have traditionally been neglected and marginalized in the study of the Holocaust.” Dr. Costello is using the resource to teach students about Holocaust history from these new perspectives. In addition to using the resource for various writing projects, they are using the site to learn how to work with archival material and do research. One research assignment about layered narratives asks students to think about how stories and histories become more complex and layered with the addition of new research. The second research assignment asks students to use the database to make visual research maps and explore how history and memory connect narratives of the Holocaust.