Projects

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.

Title: Othering, Choreographer: Michele Hanlon, Composer: Kevin Hanlon, Performers: Delanie Bitler, Melissa Bjork, Kylah Henry, Leon Martin, Katie Mooney

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.


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.


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.