Bruno Chaouat named new CHGS director

AJW Staff Report

The University of Minnesota’s College of Liberal Arts has named Bruno Chaouat as the new director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS). Chaouat, an associate professor in French, has been at the university since 2002.

Chaouat’s academic research addresses, among other topics, post-Holocaust art and literature, and he has written essays in French and English about the representation of the Holocaust in visual arts. His work also examines the challenges faced by Jews in France, and focuses on the polemics of the new anti-Semitism in relation to the current Middle East conflict.

“I am very pleased that we are able to appoint a director who has Bruno’s longtime experience on both the Center for Holocaust Studies and Center for Jewish Studies advisory boards,” James A. Parente Jr., dean of the College of Liberal Arts, said in a press release. “His deep involvement with the CHGS will lend itself to extending the legacy of founding director Stephen Feinstein, and his background in the humanities will bring many innovative directions to the center’s research, teaching and outreach missions.”

Chaouat assumed the directorship on July 1. He has already begun putting together a lecture series for the 2010-11 academic year titled “Alternative Narratives — or Denial?”

Chaouat is also building a partnership with Université de Paris VII-Diderot, whose department of Sciences Humaines Cliniques has a highly regarded program on trauma, genocide and psychoanalysis.

(American Jewish World, 7.23.10)