Friday, April 11, 2008, 6:30 –8:30 p.m.
MIDDLE EAST & MIDDLE EASTERN AMERICAN CENTER
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Room 9204/5, 365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street)
How is trauma remembered? How is it passed on to future generations? What role can memoir writers play in bearing witness to trauma? This panel explores the ways three women authors have recorded stories of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust.
ALEX HINTON (moderator) is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University, Newark. His publications include Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide, Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide and Genocide: An Anthropological Reader.
ANTONIA ARLAN (panelist)is professor of Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature at Padua University, Italy. La masseria delle allodole is her first novel, chronicling her ancestors’ fate Anatolia after 1915. The famous cinematographers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani have turned it into a movie by the same name.
MARGARET AHNERT (panelist) grew up in New York City and received her MFA from Goucher College. She has produced television documentaries and lectured as a docent at the Metropolitan Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art. She is the author of The Knock on the Door: A Journey through the Darkness of the Armenian Genocide, which recounts her mother’s experiences of the forced deportations and Armenian Genocide.
CATHERINE FILLOUX (panelist), an award-winning playwright, has been writing about genocide, human rights, and social justice for the past twenty years; honors include PeaceWriting Award (Omni Center for Peace), Roger L. Stevens Award (Kennedy Center), Eric Kocher Playwrights Award (O'Neill) and Callaway Award (New Dramatists). Her plays have been published produced internationally. She has also written the libretti for two produced operas. She is a co-founder of Theatre Without Borders.
