Judith Lyon-Caen, The Return of the Little "h" (Typographical Slips and Antisemitism)
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Judith Lyon-Caen (Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
The Return of the Little "h" (Typographical Slips and Antisemitism)
Drawing on my own experience as a Holocaust scholar of reactions to the events of October 7 and the war between Israel and Hamas in French universities, I will attempt to reflect on what the suspicion of a "return of anti-Semitism" perceived through weak signals might mean in the context of heightened political confrontationality.
This event is co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of France and the Francophone World.
Judith Lyon-Caen is a Professor of Contemporary History at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris. Her research field covers the relationships between history and literature (19 - 20th Century) in the French context and in Holocaust Historiography. In 2019, she published La Griffe du temps. Ce que l'histoire peut dire de la littérature, a research at the crossroads of literary hermeneutics and the social history of literature.
A specialist in the works of Holocaust survivor historian Michel Borwicz, she is interested in literary practices in the camps and ghettos of occupied Europe and the ways in which the first historiographies of the Holocaust considered literary writings as ‘documents’ or ‘testimonies’.
Her current research concerns the political history of the transmission of literature (with a focus on Balzac in the context of Vichy and collaboration in France), and in 2025 she will begin a Franco-German collective project on Holocaust diaries and other forms of personal writing.