Michael Rothberg - Director, Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies
Michael Rothberg is the founding Director of the new Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies Initiative at the University of Illinois. A Professor of English and a Conrad Humanities Scholar, Rothberg served as Director of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory from 2003-2009. Affiliated with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and the Programs in Comparative Literature and Jewish Culture and Society, Rothberg works in the fields of Holocaust and genocide studies, critical theory and cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary literature.
His work has been published in such journals as American Literary History, Critical Inquiry, Cultural Critique, History and Memory, History and Theory, New German Critique, and PMLA, and has been translated into French, German, and Hungarian. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) with Neil Levi and Cary Nelson and the Struggle for the University: Poetry, Politics, and the Profession (2009) with Peter Garrett. His current work explores the relationship between trauma, memory, and justice in a variety of national and transnational contexts.