More information: HUMANITIES for Humans
Charges of being racist or fascist have filled the airwaves, cyberspace, and private and public discussions in our times of heightened crisis brought on by ultra-partisan politics and local and state violence. President Vladimir Putin’s justification for invading the Ukraine to prevent the fascists from invading Russia is just the latest in perversions of history and current events.
Featuring Professor Michael Hanchard, Political Scientist, University of Pennsylvania; and Professor Dagmar Herzog, Historian, CUNY Graduate School. Moderated by Professor Irene Kacandes, German Studies and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College.
Borrowing the title of Michael Hanchard’s next book, this conversation laid out basic definitions of the two terms and show some of the ways they are intimately and insidiously connected.
This event is part of a series called “Humanities for Humans”, presented in partnership with the Walter de Gruyter Foundation (Berlin). Across eight sessions — four in-person and four virtual — the series brings people together to help generate a better understanding of what the humanities are and what role they can play in today’s complex world.
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she teaches on the histories of gender and sexuality, Nazism and the Holocaust, and historical methodology and theory. Publications include: Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, 2005); Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2011); Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge, 2017); Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (Wisconsin, 2018); and (coedited) The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (Routledge, 2021). Her current project, Eugenic Phantasms, considers how a focus on the theology and politics of disability in twentieth-century Germany changes how we think about racism and fascism alike.
Michael G. Hanchard is the Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor in the Africana Studies Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Marginalized Populations project. His publications include Orpheus and Power: The Movimento Negro of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1945-1988 (Princeton, 1994), Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil, editor, (Duke, 1999), Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (Oxford, 2006) and most recently The Spectre of Race: How Discrimination Haunts Western Democracy (Princeton, 2018). He is currently at work on a book entitled Fascism and Racism: A Love Story, a meditation on the continuities and discontinuities between fascism and other forms of racial rule. Prof. Hanchard was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
Irene Kacandes was educated at Harvard University, Aristotle University (Thessaloniki) and the Freie Universität (Berlin). Kacandes holds the Dartmouth Professorship #2 at Dartmouth College, where she teaches in the fields of German Studies, Comparative Literature, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Jewish Studies. Author or editor of nine books, her most recent publications include Let’s Talk About Death (Prometheus, 2015) and Eastern Europe Unmapped (Berghahn, 2017). Her reflection on her paternal family’s fate in Occupied Greece, Daddy’s War (Nebraska, 2009, 2012), proposed a new genre, the paramemoir, for the study of personal material. Just released is the edited volume On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence (De Gruyter 2022). Kacandes has held a number of top positions in international professional organizations, including the presidency of the German Studies Association and of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. She also runs a book series on “Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies” at De Gruyter, Germany.