Centenary Professor Lisa Nicoletti Completes Seminar at U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies

WASHINGTON, DC – Dr. Lisa Nicoletti of Shreveport, La., has completed a two-week seminar on literature and the Holocaust conducted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for college and university faculty. Admittance into the program was highly selective—participation was limited to 20 attendees.

The seminar provided an in-depth examination of Holocaust literature, both fiction and non-fiction, and how it can be used in Holocaust education. Participants explored how history and memory are represented in literature; the relationship between oral testimony and literature; and the potentially therapeutic value of using literature to confront the emotional trauma left behind following the genocide. Three pre-eminent scholars in the field of Holocaust literature served as seminar leaders.

Dr. Nicoletti, an assistant professor of art at Centenary College of Louisiana, 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.

“Literature plays an increasingly important role in helping college students understand the Holocaust, ” says Paul Shapiro, director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. “Participants in this seminar represent the leading edge of American scholarship and teaching on the Holocaust through literature.”

The Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies was established in 1998 to promote the growth of the field of Holocaust studies and ensure the training of future generations of scholars specializing in the Holocaust.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is America’s national institution for the documentation, study and interpretation of Holocaust history, and serves as this country’s memorial to the millions of people murdered during the Holocaust. Since opening in April 1993, the Museum has welcomed more than 19 million visitors. The Museum’s primary mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about this unprecedented tragedy; to preserve the memory of those who suffered; and to encourage its visitors to reflect upon the moral questions raised by the events of the Holocaust as well as their own responsibilities as citizens of a democracy.

For more information, contact Andy Hollinger in the Museum’s Media Relations Department at (202) 488-6133 or ahollinger@ushmm.org .

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