The Bogdanow Lectures in Holocaust Studies

2023

'Gender and Ukraine.  New Approaches and Themes'
Prof. Wendy Lower (Claremont McKenna)

Professor Lower is the John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, and the Director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights. She has published widely on the Holocaust in Ukraine, victims’ testimonies, and women‘s history. Her work, Hitler's Furies: Nazi Women in the German Killing Fields (Houghton 2013), was a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed (Mariner, 2021) won the National Jewish Book Award in Holocaust history, and was shortlisted for a PEN prize and Wingate prize.

Online/zoom lecture series

Tue 31 January 2023, 6.00 pm UK time:
Lecture 1 'Gender, Genocide and the Feminization of Hatred'
Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/97498109103

In this talk, Prof Lower will explore the role of women in the Nazi movement and Holocaust as compared to other cases of genocide. How are women mobilized to support and carry out genocide, and what are the challenges in prosecuting them? Lower will also comment on the role of women in Putin's Russification and imperial genocides.

Wed 1 February 2023, 6.00 pm UK time:
Lecture 2 'Researching the Holocaust in Ukraine: New Approaches and Themes'
Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/94443191924

Drawing from her new book, The Ravine, Prof Lower will trace the different methods applied to researching the Holocaust by bullets in Ukraine. She will also comment on the recent setbacks and advances for conducting this work in Ukraine today and Putin‘s misuse of Holocaust history.

The Bogdanow Lectures Bequest

This annual public lecture series has been made possible as a result of the generous bequest to the University by Fanni Bogdanow (1927-2013), a former Professor of French and Medieval Studies at Manchester and a child refugee on the Kindertransporte.

"Fanni Bogdanow was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. When she was 11, in 1939 and just in time, her parents loaded her on to a Kindertransport train bound for Britain. She was taken in by a Quaker family in Manchester to whom she remained very grateful. In 1945, she won a scholarship to study French at Manchester University; she was to stay at Manchester, as undergraduate, postgraduate, lecturer, reader and professor, for the rest of her life. Her parents, astonishingly, survived between them Dachau, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; to Fanni's intense joy, her mother later joined her in Manchester..." [More from The Guardian]

Fanni Bogdanow's full life story interview was conducted in April 2002 by one of the Centre's previous PhD students, Ros Livshin, and was archived at the Oral Testimony Archive of the Manchester Jewish Museum, a collection compiled under the supervison of the Centre's Bill Williams.

See also

Fanni Bogdanow, 'Anne Frank and the Holocaust' in Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 88:1 (2006), 207-215.

Fanni Bogdanow, 'From Holocaust Survivor to Arthurian Scholar' in On Arthurian Women, edited by Bonnie Wheeler and Fiona Tolhurst (Dallas: Scriptorium Press, 2001), 387-394.