Friday 19 March 2010

Elkes Memorial Lecture: 22/3/2010


You are warmly invited to the seventeenth Elchanan & Miriam Elkes Memorial Lecture. William Parsons (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington DC) is going to give it on Remembering the Past for the Sake of the Future. Starting at 6.00 pm on Monday, 22 March 2010, in the Rattray Lecture Theatre, and there's a reception at 7:00pm in the Charles Wilson Building. The talk will focus on how perpetrators seem to learn from history that the world always has "reasons" for not preventing genocide and mass atrocities. Although we build effective memorials and we are seldom capable of prevention, individuals, groups, and nations can push back on mass hate and violence.
A little more on the speaker: before becoming Chief of Staff, he served as the Museum's Director of Education and was responsible for developing educational programs both in Washington and throughout the nation. For the past thirty years, he has been involved in writing, speaking, and creating programs that advance public awareness and knowledge about the Holocaust and genocide and the implications of this history for the world we live in today. In 2002, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from Cornell College for his career work in Holocaust and genocide education.
His published works include: Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior ( 1982); The Middle Passage (1986); A World of Difference: Teacher/Student Study Guide (1987); The African Meeting House: A Sourcebook (co-author, 1988); Everyone's Not Here: Families of the Armenian Genocide, A Study Guide (1989); and Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (co-editor, revised for 2004 publication under a new title: Century of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts).