The spotlight series is a showcase of research, creative inquiry, and other scholarly engagement of the campus community. View some of the past spotlights and learn about the research of our talented Stetson community!
A Global History of the Nazi “Jewish Question” Three Territorial “Solutions” and the Role of Great Britain (Chapters Four, Five, and Eight)
By the end of the nineteenth century, the “Jewish Question” and its many putative “solutions” had come to play a role in European debates on (geo)politics and national security, economy and society, and culture and identity. These entangled histories of ethnicity and religion; of disintegrating empires and emerging nation-states; of global capitalism and colonialism, of race and space, provide the context for the fundamental questions underlying my research on the Nazi “Jewish Question” and the three chapters at the focus of my 2022 Summer Grant: What were its various conceptions and “solutions” in the period from 1933 to 1942? To what degree did non-German and, indeed, non-European states and actors, in particular Great Britain and its colonial empire (for the purposes of my 2022 Summer Grant), help define, determine, or oppose Nazi conceptions of the “Jewish Question” and its various “solutions”? What were the ethnonational, geographic, political-institutional, cultural, and intellectual, and socioeconomic challenges and constraints? What new perspectives might a global history of the Nazi “Jewish Question” before the “Final Solution” offer us in terms of understanding the broader geopolitical context, the historical stages, the policy fits and starts, the multilateral and multinational interventions (or lack thereof), that lead to ethnic cleansing and genocide in other contexts?
Eric Kurlander, Ph.D., is a professor of modern European history at Stetson University. Kurlander earned his B.A. at Bowdoin College and his M.A. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, teaching for three years at Harvard before coming to Stetson in 2001.
TO READ A BODY OPEN: AUTOTHEORY AND THE ARCHIVE
Combining personal narrative with readings of primary texts and archival research, To Read a Body Open is a collection of autotheoretical essays about coming into creative and political self-awareness via readings of several writers whose work has influenced that process: Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Tee Corinne, Clarice Lispector, and Kathy Acker, to name a few. The essays are experimental in their form and methods: I am positioning my body as a living archive alongside official and unofficial archives of these writers. Drawing on the felt experience of being in the archive, the essays formally reflect readings of these writers’ works and lives. Throughout, I encounter their art and the archive as ritual and as reckoning with the unstable place of queer female embodiment and the ideological underpinnings of my racialized subjectivity. These essays offer a fierce, intimate look at our reading practices as embodied life experiences, based on positionality.
In this talk, I will offer some of my thinking around autotheory and the archive, as well as a short performance from an essay in progress.
Teresa Carmody’s writing includes fiction, creative nonfiction, inter-arts collaborations, and hybrid forms. Her books include Maison Femme: a fiction (2015) and The Reconception of Marie (2020); her essays and fiction have been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, Autofocus, and more. teresacarmody.com / @troseistrose on IG