From January 9-13, Dr. Melissa Kravetz participated in the Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar on Gender and Sexuality in the Holocaust at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. The seminar, which is held annually during the first week of January, is designed for college and university faculty who are preparing to teach Holocaust or Holocaust-related courses.
Kravetz already teaches courses on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Longwood as well as a summer course on The Holocaust through the Virginia Holocaust Museum's Teacher Education Institute. Thus, the Hess seminar was a perfect fit to revise curriculum in her current courses and to create new interdisciplinary courses on gender, sexuality, and the Holocaust for the new general education curriculum.
During the seminar in D.C., Kravetz along with 20 faculty members from universities all over the country heard presentations from senior scholars in the field of Gender and Holocaust studies and also from staff members of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies. The Mandel Center staff also introduced the participants to the resources of the Museum that they can utilize in the classroom.
By the end of the week, Dr. Kravetz had access to a variety of primary sources to use in her classroom and she also discussed teaching strategies to teach this difficult material with faculty members across multiple disciplines. Kravetz will be using six different readings and several primary sources introduced during the seminar for her spring Seminar in European History: Women, Gender, and Sexuality. "The course has fundamentally changed the way I'll be teaching courses on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in the future," she concluded.