(April 1, 2015)

Annual Rose and Louis Van Thyn Lecture commences April 13

SHREVEPORT, LA — Dr. Pascale Bos of the University of Texas at Austin will present the annual Rose and Louis Van Thyn Lecture on Monday, April 13, at 7:00 p.m. in the Whited Room. The event is free and open to the public.

Bos, Associate Professor of Germanic Studies will discuss Gender of the Genocide: Women, Men, and the Holocaust.

"On the face of it, questions about gender may seem to have little bearing on the study of the Holocaust," said Bos. "After all, the Nazis persecuted certain groups of people regardless of gender: because they belonged to an 'inferior' race, or religion, or adhered to an ideology they objected to. Yet gender indeed played a role in the lives of the perpetrators, and in that of the victims, and the bystanders."

Her lecture will explore whether gender mattered in the Holocaust and WWII, what men and women's experiences were like, how they remember these experiences, and how they recount them. Bos will discuss what can be learned from these experiences and how it applies to current and future genocides and other human rights abuses.

Bos will approach her lecture from both a scholarly perspective and a personal point of view as her mother and grandmother survived the war in the Netherlands in hiding while the rest of her family was deported and killed in Auschwitz and Sobibor.

The Van Thyn lecture series honors Rose and Louis Van Thyn, Holocaust survivors who dedicated themselves to retelling their stories so that people would not forget or repeat those horrors. For her extraordinary community service, Mrs. Van Thyn was awarded the honorary Doctor of Humane Letters at Centenary's 2002 commencement exercises.

Friends of the Van Thyns established the Rose and Louis Van Thyn Board of Regents Endowed Lectureship in November 2009. The Van Thyn Lectureship provides educational opportunities for the students of the College and members of the surrounding community, with a goal of teaching about the history of the Holocaust, and how to recognize signs of intolerance and provide a means for preventing prejudice and hatred.