Centenary's Dr. Lisa Nicoletti One of 12 Earning Scholarships to Study Holocaust Issues at Cornell

SHREVEPORT, LA -- Dr. Lisa Nicoletti of the Centenary College Department of Art and Visual Culture was one of 12 recipients of a Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst scholarship this summer. It allowed her to take part in Cornell University¹s six-week interdisciplinary seminar in German Studies, named "Visual Representations of the Holocaust Potentialities and Taboos."

The seminar explored the limits of acceptable Holocaust representation, considering recent public controversies over museums, films, art, and memorialization, as well as the aesthetic quandaries specific to Holocaust visualization that often lead to a work being labeled transgressive. Participants first focused on the earliest photos and films from concentration camps along with their subsequent pedagogical and juridical uses, considered the reception of the first television miniseries on the Holocaust in America and Germany, and concluded by considering the role of digital and Internet technologies in remembering or forgetting the past.

During the seminar, Dr. Nicoletti examined 34 films and presented her new research on representations of Anne Frank and the popular use of images of children to narrate war¹s atrocity, a project begun during her previous residency in June at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The seminar was led by Dr. David Bathrick, Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Theatre, Film, and Dance and German Studies, with guest visits by eminent Holocaust scholars Dr. Julia Hell (University of Michigan), Dr. Anson Rabinbach (Princeton University), and Dr. Wulf Kansteiner (State University of New York-Binghamton).

Dr. Nicoletti, an assistant professor of art,, has been a member of the Centenary faculty since 1999. She earned a B.A. degree from Augsburg College in 1990; an M.A. in English from the University of Minnesota in 1993; and an M.A. in art history and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1994 and 1999, respectively. She was honored with Centenary's first Charlton H. Lyons Faculty Summer Research Award in 2002.

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