Shoah Foundation president to speak at Rice Feb. 10

CONTACT: Margot Dimond
PHONE: (713) 348-6775
E-MAIL: mailto:mdimond@rice.edu

SHOAH FOUNDATION PRESIDENT TO SPEAK AT RICE FEB. 10
Genocide and mass murder will be examined using video from Shoah archive

Douglas Greenberg, president and chief executive officer of Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, will use the video testimony of a Holocaust survivor to compare survivor memories with historical fact in a lecture, Thursday, Feb. 10, from 8 to 9:30 p.m. at Duncan Hall McMurtry Auditorium on the Rice University campus.

The presentation, titled ”Henry’s Harmonica: Memory and History in a Genocidal World,” explores the implications of the intersection of memory and history on digital libraries.

The Shoah Foundation archive contains approximately 117,000 hours of videotapes of eyewitness testimony from 52,000 Holocaust survivors and witnesses — recorded in 32 languages and 56 countries. The Foundation has also produced 10 documentary films using the testimonies in its collection and creates educational products and programs that are in use in 16 countries and 11,000 schools around the world.

Rice is one of three institutions — along with Yale and University of Southern California – that are participating in a pilot project to explore the scholarly uses of the foundation’s digital video archive in its research and instruction programs. Charles Henry, vice provost and university librarian, said the results to-date of that project had a great deal to do with the decision to invite Greenberg to campus.

”We’ve had a very powerful experience working with the Shoah Foundation – both in the effectiveness of the archive as a classroom tool and in our developing relationship with the foundation itself,” Henry said. ”Working with Doug Greenberg helped us better understand the importance and transformational potential of the archive. ”

Henry said that the topic of Greenberg’s lecture also dovetails with the goal of Rice’s Technology, Cognition and Culture Lecture Series, which traces the evolution of information technologies and their influence on civilization. ”We felt that this talk would be an opportunity for us to explore the ways that technology can preserve and make accessible profoundly important cultural artifacts and historical records,” he said.

Greenberg came to the Shoah Foundation in 2000 from the Chicago Historical Society, where he served as president and director for seven years. Previously he was vice president of the American Council of Learned Societies and associate dean of the faculty at Princeton University. He also taught history at Rutgers, Lawrence, and Princeton universities and is author or editor of many books and essays on the history of early America and American law, as well as on technology, scholarship and libraries. More recently he has begun to write and speak about the Holocaust and genocide and their impact upon the modern world.

A native of New Jersey, Greenberg received his undergraduate degree in history from Rutgers University, and his master’s and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and a Fellow of the Society of American Historians. He serves on the boards of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, the California Council on the Humanities, and the Center for The Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College.

For more information on Greenberg’s lecture and for parking information, call 713-348-4636.

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