Ackerman Chronicle

We would like to share some of the current updates from our faculty.

Dr. Nils Roemer, who also serves as the interim dean for the School of the Arts and Humanities and is the director of the Ackerman Center, recently announced at the annual State of the Center that his professorship was elevated to distinguished.

Pictured above: Dr. Roemer with Stan and Barbara Rabin in 2019

Dr. David Patterson and Dr. Alvin H. Rosenfeld will be presenting a special program as part of this week's Yom HaShoah commemorations.

"Holocaust Education: Lessons Learned, Lessons Missed, and Their Application to Contemporary Manifestations of Antisemitsm"

Wednesday, April 7th at 11am CST

Click here to learn more and register for this event, which is being hosted by AZM Antisemitism and the Anti-Zionism and Holocaust Denial Project.

Dr. Amy Kerner developed and taught a new graduate seminar this spring, “Genocide in Latin America.” Students interrogated the concept of genocide – coined by Raphael Lemkin in response to the Holocaust – reading and analyzing indigenous histories from the Spanish conquest through the nineteenth century, the Guatemalan genocide, and after. The class served as a critical introduction both to genocide as a historical and scholarly category and to the indigenous historiography of Latin America. With papers and projects ranging from the history of the transatlantic slave trade in Brazil to contemporary Guatemalan performance art, students used new and creative approaches to bridge the fields of genocide studies and Latin American history.

Dr. Debra Pfister is organizing the tenth annual Teachers' Institute, to be held tentatively this June 23 & 24. The title of this year's two-day workshop for middle and high school teachers is “On the Brink: Saving Jews during the Holocaust.”

The Teachers' Institute offers continuing education credit, which is provided to educators in the greater Dallas area free of charge thanks to a generous endowment to the Ackerman Center.

Dr. Pedro J. Gonzalez Corona organized a seminar series on antisemitism in Latin America for the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP). Please click here for more information about this webinar, which will be hosted on Tuesday, April 13th.

Additionally, Dr. Gonzalez has also presented multiple Spanish-language programs in the Dallas area as well as in Latin America. Most recently, he participated in a discussion with survivor Pieter Kohnstam in conjunction with the Anne Frank Center in Guatemala, "Connecting the Present with the Past through His Story and the Life of Anne Frank."

Dr. Sarah Valente has been selected to present at the Esther and Sidney Rabb Center for Holocaust and Revival Studies online international conference at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel on June 1st - 3rd. She has also been selected to participate in the Holocaust Education Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU) 2021 Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization at Northwestern June 20th - July 2nd.

Dr. Valente is also the host of the Ackerman Center Podcast.

Cynthia Seton-Rogers, Academic and Outreach Events Manager