Geographies of the Holocaust

Anne Knowles and Alberto Giordano will present Geographies of the Holocaust. This book is the result of a multi-year collective project that has explored the geographies of the Holocaust at every scale of human experience, from the European continent to the experiences of individual human bodies. Built on six innovative case studies utilizing Geographical Information System (GIS) science, it brings together historians and geographers to interrogate the places and spaces of the genocide. The cases encompass the landscapes of particular places (the killing zones in the East, deportations from sites in Italy, the camps of Auschwitz, the ghettos of Budapest) and the intimate spaces of bodies on evacuation marches. Geographies of the Holocaust puts forward models and a research agenda for different ways of visualizing and thinking about the Holocaust by examining the spaces and places where it was enacted and experienced.
Anne Knowles is Professor of Geography at Middlebury College. She is one of the pioneers in developing historical GIS as an interdisciplinary method to infuse historical research and teaching with geographical awareness and spatial analysis. She edited the first books on historical GIS, Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History (2002); and Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship (2008). In her own research, Knowles used GIS to build the empirical framework for her major study of the U.S. iron industry, Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry 1800 – 1868 (University of Chicago Press, 2012). She is Principal Investigator, along with Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano, on the first interdisciplinary project to explore the potential for using GIS and other geospatial methods to study the Holocaust. Knowles is lead editor of Geographies of the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 2014).

Alberto Giordano is Professor and Chair in the Department of Geography at Texas State University. His current research interests are in the geography of genocide and the Holocaust, Historical GIS, and spatial forensics. His publications include a coauthored book (in Italian) on geographic data quality, and several journal articles and book chapters. He is co-editor with Anne Knowles and Tim Cole of Geographies of the Holocaust. He has been Co-Chair of the Historical Geography Network for the Social Science History Association and a Member of the International Cartographic Association commissions on Maps and the Internet and on Spatial Data Quality. He is on the board of the newly established National Center for Research in Geography Education (NCRGE), a joint initiative of Texas State and the Association of American Geographers (AAG).

The presentation will be followed by a reception.

Co-sponsored by the Departments of Geography, French and Italian, Jewish Studies, and History, as well as the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
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