Linguistic Amnesia? Superlative German Reactions to Post-1945 Genocides

The IAS is delighted to welcome Professor Andrew Port for a lecture entitled “Linguistic Amnesia? Superlative German Reactions to Post-1945 Genocides”, focusing on ways in which Germans talked about the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, with an eye to the "peculiarities" of their locution and what that might say about Vergangenheitsbewältigung, etc.

Andrew Port (Wayne State University) is the recipient of the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, awarded by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where he is a non-resident Fellow. He spent the first half of 2016 in Freiburg, Germany, as a Marie Curie Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS), and is spending four months in 2018 as a Visiting Professor at Nottingham Trent University in the United Kingdom, thanks to a generous award from the Leverhulme Trust.

Port’s research focuses on modern Germany, communism and state socialism, memory and comparative genocide, labor history, and social protest. His current project – “What Germans Talk About When They Talk About Genocide” – looks at German reactions to genocide in other parts of the world after the Holocaust, with a special focus on Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia.