Projects
Digital Studies of the Holocaust
Archival materials of the Holocaust are exceptionally voluminous. Not only did the Nazis keep detailed records, but institutions such as Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have compiled vast and accessible digital databases on every aspect of the Holocaust. In order to analyze such a massive scale of data, digital technologies allow us to simultaneously study the larger shifting patterns in the process of mass murder. Our project aims to dissect this complex process of mass killing and its constantly changing implementation within a large and shifting geographical space. The efficient implementation of the Holocaust required a sophisticated infrastructure and constant adjustment. To understand the development of a genocidal practice, it is important to simultaneously analyze the design of concentration camps, the transportation system, the geographical locations involved such as gathering points in urban centers, the ghettos, and the concentration camps all over Europe. Moreover, since time is a significant factor in the Holocaust, our project aims to comprehend the chronological development to better understand the unfolding of the Holocaust within the changing landscape of World War II.
Roma Genocide Maps
The Roma Genocide Map project is an interactive, digital platform developed in collaboration with Yahad-In Unum, aimed at documenting and visualizing the historical persecution of the Roma people during the Holocaust and beyond. The map highlights key locations, events, and survivor testimonies related to the Roma genocide, serving as an educational tool to promote awareness and remembrance. By offering a comprehensive view of the Roma experience, the project deepens understanding of the atrocities committed and the resilience of the Roma community.
This project is developed as part of the efforts at the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas, which engages in scholarly research, public education, and advocacy related to human rights and historical atrocities.
Ackerman Center Podcast
The Ackerman Center Podcast provides a space for the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies to publicly engage in a thoughtful and in-depth conversation about the Holocaust, genocide, and human rights studies. Launched in 2020, this podcast works to extend the conversation beyond academic audiences—providing an educational, engaging, and transformative experience. Through engaging with the past, we work to promote solutions for global justice and peace in our world.
Translation Workshops
The Ackerman Center has held multiple workshops with students and faculty to translate Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue”, excerpts of Elie Wiesel’s “Ani Maamin”, and Miklós Radnóti’s “Like a Bull” into more than a dozen languages. To see those translations, please click on the respective works’ titles.
The Curio Project
History matters in an age of displacement, war and conflict. Ordinary things and objects have many stories and diverse meanings for different people, past and present. At times, they recall for us a forgotten, hidden, and even destroyed past. A curio is a container to hold precious things. This project curates and studies our objects and memories of them. We have created this continually evolving site to cultivate and curate these contents, of lives, of life, in an attempt to fashion a space where these items and the stories about them, not only stand as testament to the past, but in some small measure, stand to teach us about who we are and what our future is, as shaped by our concepts of the same.
Confronting Our Past
This special project, made possible by a grant from the Communities Foundation of Texas, was designed to be a new collaborative, interactive citizen history project that sought to explore, document, and curate the history of hate and racial/ethnic violence in Dallas-Fort Worth. The project seeks to make historical sources for the study of the history of antisemitism and racism in the Dallas metroplex more available.
The public event held November 11, 2018 brought various individual contributions together: Dr. Nils Roemer (Stan and Barbara Rabin Professor of Holocaust Studies, UT Dallas), Michel Hanlon (Associate Dean For the Arts, UT Dallas), Dr. Mary Catherine Mueller (Lecturer, SMU), Jennifer McNabb (PhD Candidate, SMU), Wendi Kavanaugh (PhD Student, UT Dallas), Sarah Hashmi (PhD Student, UT Dallas), Clara Marsela Lopez (Masters Student, UT Dallas), and Emily Riso (Senior, UT Dallas).
A special interpretive dance was performed as a part of this event.
Family History and Genealogy Workshop
The Ackerman Center is working with graduate students to research archives and primary source documents about victims of the Holocaust. These workshops focus on a specific family and finding all relevant documents associated with members of that family. The goal of this project is two-fold: to help piece together missing parts of a family’s story and to teach students how to search online archives, as well as how to interpret and compile those results.
History Unfolded
The Ackerman Center has partnered with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC on the History Unfolded project. It asks students, teachers, and history buffs throughout the United States what was possible for Americans to have known about the Holocaust as it was happening and how Americans responded by looking in local newspapers for news and opinion about 31 different Holocaust-era events that took place in the United States and Europe. The Ackerman Center is focusing on the Dallas area news coverage of the events surrounding the Holocaust. More information can be found on the museum’s website.