Judith Lyon-Caen, Poet, resistance fighter, survivor, Holocaust historian: the singular journey of Michel Borwicz
When and Where
Speakers
Description
Elizabeth and Tony Comper Holocaust Education Fund
Judith Lyon-Caen (Ecole des Hautes en Sciences Sociales, Paris)
Poet, resistance fighter, survivor, Holocaust historian: the singular journey of Michel Borwicz
My lecture focuses on the intellectual itinerary of a Holocaust survivor historian who moved to France from Poland in 1947, and wrote a pioneering thesis on Holocaust testimony in 1953. I will place his trajectory in the perspective of research on the early Holocaust Historiography, emphasizing the place of exile in the development of “unclassifiable” and multidisciplinary knowledge on the “Catastrophe”.
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.