Holocaust and Genocide Studies Faculty

Tatjana Lichtenstein

Associate Professor, Department of History
Faculty Coordinator for the Minor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 
PhD 2009, University of Toronto, Canada

Dr. Tatjana Lichtenstein is an associate professor of Modern Eastern Europe in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

Her book Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia: Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Ethnic Belonging was published in 2016.  She is currently working on a book project on intermarried families and their children in the Bohemian Lands during the Holocaust.

At the University of Texas, she teaches surveys and seminars on WWII, the Holocaust, and an introductory course in genocide studies. Her classes include “Introduction to Holocaust and Genocide Studies,” the prerequisite class for the minor in that field, “Legacies of WWII in Eastern Europe,” “Poland and the Second World,” and “War and Genocide: The Holocaust.” Tatjana served as Director for UT’s Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies from 2017-2021.  Since 2014, she has taught in the Frank Denius Normandy Scholars Program on WWII, the College of Liberal Arts’ premier Study Abroad program
 

Recent Publications:

Lichtenstein, T. (Spring 2024). “Mitigating Persecution: Intermarried Families and the Significance of Social Networks during the Holocaust in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” in Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies vol 38, no. 1: 18-37.

Lichtenstein, T. (December 2023). “Contested Paternity: Seeking Reprieve from Anti-Jewish Persecution in the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.” Judaica Bohemiae vol. 58 (Special Issue: “Jews and Non-Jews in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia: Attitudes, Strategies, Policies, and Practices”): 115-140. 

Lichtenstein, T. (January 2024) “Foreword,” a historical essay about Terezín/Theresienstadt and the Holocaust, in Dennis Carlyle Darling, Borrowed Time: Survivors of Nazi Terezín Remember (Austin: The University of Texas Press (Series: Exploring Jewish Arts and Culture)), 13-19.  

Lichtenstein, Tatjana (2016). Zionists in Interwar Czechoslovakia: Minority Nationalism and the Politics of Ethnic Belonging. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

 

 

Pascale Bos

Associate Professor, Department of Germanic Studies
PhD in Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota (Twin Cities)

Dr. Pascale Bos is Associate Professor of German, Netherlandic Studies, and Comparative Literature at The University of Texas at Austin. She also teaches in the Jewish Studies, European Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies Programs.  Her research focuses on Holocaust and Genocide Studies with a special emphasis on gender and memory, sexual violence and war, and the after effects of trauma and wartime violence.

Bos is a steering committee member of the International Working Group Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC- Hamburg Institute of Social Science). http://warandgender.net/about/

Pascale Bos’s current book project, "Her flesh is branded: ‘For Officers Only’”: Scandalizing Sexual Violence in Holocaust Literature and Film, 1943-1961, is an interdisciplinary literary and cultural-historical study of the early cultural memory of the Holocaust in the United States and Israel as it was shaped by a set of public narratives about purported Nazi sexual enslavement of Jewish women. This study shows such stories to be based on propaganda and rumor and analyzes the function that the trope of sexual slavery fulfilled within the cultural memory of the largest Jewish communities outside of Europe in the U.S. and Palestine/Israel in the early postwar decades when only partial and fragmented information of the event was available. As the stories prove to be connected and move back and forth between the U.S. and Palestine/ Israel, they present a case study of the interchange of transnational memory among a Diasporic, ethnic (Jewish) community which found itself in crisis in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide.

She is also working on representations of the Holocaust in U.S. popular literature 1955-1975.

 

Recent Publications:

Bos, Pascale R. “Sexual Violence in Ka-Tzetnik’s House of Dolls.” In: Holocaust History and the Readings of Ka-Tzetnik, edited by Annette F. Timm, with the assistance of David Tall, 105-138. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018.

Bos, Pascale R. “The Holocaust and Gender.” Women of Central and Eastern Europe in the WWII: Gendered Experiences in Times of Extreme Violence (in Ukrainian). Edited by Gelinda Grinchenko, Kateryna Kobchenko, and Oksana Kis. Kyiv, Ukraine, April 2015.

Bos, Pascale R. “‘Her Flesh Is Branded: “For Officers Only”’: Imagining and Imagined Sexual Violence against Jewish Women during the Holocaust.” In Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World, edited by Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes, 59–85. Northwestern University Press, 2014.

Bos, Pascale R. “Empathy, Sympathy, Simulation? Resisting a Holocaust Pedagogy of Identification.” Review of               Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 36, no. 5 (2014): 403-421.

Bos, Pascale R. “Feminists Interpreting the Politics of Wartime Rape: Berlin 1945, Yugoslavia 1992-3.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 no. 4 (Summer 2006): 995-1025.

Bos, Pascale R. German-Jewish Literature in the Wake of the Holocaust: Grete Weil, Ruth Klüger and the Politics of Address. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

 

 

Rebecca Rossen

Associate Professor, Performance as Public Practice Program, Department of Theatre and Dance
PhD 2006, Northwestern University

Dr. Rossen’s research and teaching focuses on the aesthetic, cultural, historical, and political meanings and impacts of dance and performance, as well as the interrelationships between performance, embodiment, site, memory, trauma, and history. She is the author of Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance (Oxford University Press 2014), winner of the Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for excellence in dance research. Her current book project, Moving Memories: Representations of the Holocaust in Dance and Performance, considers how dance moves memories and histories of the Holocaust in dozens of works for stage, as well as site-specific performance, dance on film, multimedia performance, and documentary, performed in the United States, as well as Belarus, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Poland, Russia, and the UK. This book earned her a 2023 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, a Provost’s Authors Fellowship, and a Schusterman Center Rapoport Fellowship.

Dr. Rossen’s courses include “Holocaust and Performance,” “Memory, History, and Trauma in Performance,” “Jewish Identity in American Performance,” “Narrative in Physical Performance,” and graduate-level courses in performance analysis and theory. Dr. Rossen is a winner of the 2015 Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award and a recipient of Teaching Excellence Awards from the Department of Theatre and Dance and Women's and the Center for Women's and Gender Studies. 

 

Relevant Publications:

Rossen, Rebecca. Moving Memories: Representations of the Holocaust in Dance and Performance. (Forthcoming)

Rossen, Rebecca. “Spectacular Suffering: Holocaust Representation in Competition Dance,” Dance Research Journal 56: 2. 

Rossen, Rebecca. “Bodily Transfiguration and Transgenerational Trauma in the Art of Yuliya Lanina.” Feminist Studies 50, 1  Summer 2024): 65–91. 

Rossen, Rebecca. “Excavating Holocaust History: Site, Memory, and Community in Tamar Rogoff’s Ivye Project.” The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance. Naomi Jackson et. al eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 550–64. 

Rossen, Rebecca. Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Public Scholarship:

“In ‘Gefilte Fish,’ a metaphor for once and future trauma, Yulia Lanina addresses the silence surrounding the Holocaust and the war in Ukraine,” The Forward, 25 May 2002.

“Yuliya Lanina, Drawing on Violence,” Sightlines Magazine 10 May 2022.

 

 

Rachel Moss

Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance
PhD, Northwestern University

Dr. Rachel Merrill Moss (PhD, Northwestern University) is a theatre historian and scholar of performance who focuses on pre- and postwar performances of Jewishness in Poland. In her work, Rachel explores the connectivities between theatrical, institutional, and political performances and changing national narratives, looking to both Polish and Yiddish theatrical production across the past century in Poland. She was a 2018-19 Fulbright Student Research Fellow in Poland, and the 2022 recipient of the International Federation for Theatre Research New Scholars’ Prize for her essay “The Theatre of Jewish Absence in Poland,” which examines post-EU accession era performances of Holocaust trauma and loss in the contemporary Polish theatrical landscape. As a theatre practitioner, Rachel most recently served as the production dramaturg for the NYC premiere of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class (Wall Street Journal “Best Theatre of 2024,” 2025 Lucille Lortel Awardee for Best Off-Broadway Revival), a play that frames transhistorical Jewish/non-Jewish relations in Poland around a Polish-instigated WWII-era pogrom in a Polish-Jewish town, inspired by the true events of the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom. Rachel regularly co-convenes the East Central Europe-focused working session at the American Society for Theatre Research, and frequently presents work at the Association for Jewish Studies and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies conferences. In 2024, Rachel presented research at the 18th edition of the Lessons & Legacies of the Holocaust conference. 

 

Relevant Publications:

Moss, Rachel Merrill, Alisa Ballard Lin and Dennis C. Beck, eds. Precarious Identities: Theatre and Performance of Refuge and Risk in East Central Europe. Advanced contract with Iowa University Press (forthcoming). In review.

Moss, Rachel Merrill.“Staging a Tempest on the Brink: Klara Segałowicz’s Remarkable Theatrical Leadership During Uncertain Times,” in Women’s Innovations in Theatre, Dance, and Performance, Volume 4: Leaders. Eva Aymami-Rene, Anita Gonzalez, and Kimberly Jew, volume editors. Bloomsbury Press (forthcoming). In review

Moss, Rachel Merrill and Debra Caplan, eds. The Dybbuk Century: The Jewish Play that Possessed the World, University of Michigan Press (October 2023).

Moss, Rachel Merrill. “Skrzypek as Synecdoche: Polish-Jewishness in Fiddler on the Roof,” Theatre Journal, Vol. 75, Number 2 (June 2023), pp. 143-166.

Moss, Rachel Merrill and Gary Alan Fine. “Pageants and Patriots: Jewish Spectacles as Performances of Belonging,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Volume 31, Number 1 (Fall 2018).