Course Syllabus

Course Description

This course offers a structured introduction to the Holocaust, organised around a shared timeline that moves from persecution to ghettoisation, forced labour, deportation, and mass murder, culminating at Auschwitz as the most extreme expression of the Final Solution.

In Week 1, we will establish the core chronology and concepts needed to study the Holocaust, tracing the escalation of anti Jewish policy and violence across Europe and situating Auschwitz within the broader camp system and the Nazi project of genocide. In Week 2, we will travel to Kraków and Auschwitz to follow that same evolution on the ground, tracking the experiences of Kraków’s long established Jewish community from the historic Jewish quarter through the creation of the ghetto, forced displacement, and the camp system, culminating in a visit to Auschwitz. In Week 3, we will return to the classroom to work closely with primary sources from both victims and perpetrators, asking how historians interpret testimony, documents, and narrative fragments, and what these sources reveal about agency, ideology, coercion, and survival.

Across the three weeks, we will return to several persistent historical and ethical questions, including what makes the Holocaust historically distinctive, how categories such as victim, perpetrator, and bystander should be defined and analysed, and how memory and commemoration shape what societies choose to confront, contest, or omit. By the end of the course, you will be able to articulate the Holocaust’s historical development with clarity and to analyse its human experiences and documentary traces with care and precision.

Course Objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

1. Gain a comprehensive understanding of the key historical events of the Holocaust, with attention to how these events unfolded in specific places.
2. Critically engage with and analyse historical scholarship in Holocaust studies, recognising diverse methodological and theoretical approaches and the importance of context.
3. Develop place based, experiential learning skills by interpreting sites in Kraków and Auschwitz as historical sources and connecting observations to primary texts and historiographical debates.
4. Identify and critically assess historical arguments on contested issues within Holocaust history and construct an original argument using primary and secondary sources.
5. Attain insight into the strengths, limitations, and complexities of Holocaust scholarship, including the challenges of testimony, perpetrator documentation, and material traces.

Readings

The texts used in this course will be a combination of articles, historical documents, maps, and photos. Key readings will include:

1. Simone Gigliotti, et al, The Holocaust: A Reader 1st ed. 2005
2. Jon E. Lewis, Voices from the Holocaust, 2006
3. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, Anatomy of Auschwitz
4. Livia Bitton Jackson, Elli_ Coming of Age in the Holocaust
5. Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men, 2017

Lecturer

PhD (Modern History, Northwestern University, 2007). MA (Modern History, Northwestern University, 2002). BA (Modern History, Oxford University, 2001). For two decades, I have taught courses in modern history at Northwestern University in the United States and Qatar in the Middle East. My teaching emphasises creative approaches to learning that build bridges to the past. I am passionate about bringing history to life and introducing students to new places, people and ideas through innovative, student-focused pedagogy. Secretly, my goal is to turn all students into historians! I am continuing my academic journey in Denmark as a teaching and learning specialist and a faculty member focusing on 20th-century Europe at DIS. 

Approach to Teaching

"What would I have done?" This is the best question you can ask about the past. My teaching focuses on building bridges to the past that encourage students to leave behind the modern world and immerse themselves in the past. My goal is to reconstruct the past through primary sources and put students at the centre of major moments in history. To achieve this, I avoid lectures and focus on a combination of discussion, investigations, roleplaying and many other forms of interactive class that encourage students to become historians for a term (and hopefully longer).    

Expectations of the Students

Students often complain that history classes are boring because they spend all their time learning the dates on a timeline. In this course, I am not interested in what you remember. Instead, I am much more interested in what you can say about the past. This is what I call your "historical voice". I encourage students to actively engage with the history and be willing to develop and share their findings with the class. 

Specifically, active engagement in this class is defined as your active participation in the learning process, as well as your willingness to take responsibility for your own learning. In this course, you will be expected to attend all lessons, participate in class discussions, and complete assignments on time.

By actively engaging in this course, you will not only develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter, but you will also develop critical thinking skills, communication skills, and a passion for lifelong learning.

Evaluation

Participation 30%

Your engagement grade is the cornerstone of this course. It requires consistent attendance and active contributions to in-person and online discussions, demonstrating a rigorous command of the assigned materials. Each week of the term is worth 10%. 

Primary Source Analysis 10%

Once during the term, you will lead the analysis of a specific primary document. This involves situating the source within its historical context, identifying its perspective, and posing critical questions to the class to spark discussion.

Biographical Research Project 60%

The sheer enormity of the Holocaust is a statistic so vast that it is almost impossible for the human mind to truly comprehend. This project operates on the belief that while we cannot fully grasp the scale of the tragedy, we can find a deeper truth by focusing on the reconstruction of a single life. By looking closely at the experience of one individual, we attempt to understand the mechanisms of survival, the weight of choice, and the crushing reality of the system. In understanding why one person survived (or how they perished), we gain a more profound, humanised insight into why millions of others did not.

The Interpretative Journey

This is not a traditional "fact-gathering" assignment. Rather than just collecting dates and locations, you will seek interpretative insight. You will be paired with an autobiography and will physically visit the ghettos and camps described in that text.

The goal is to bridge the gap between the written word and the physical site. By walking the same ground as your subject, you will look for environmental context: how the narrowness of a street, the distance between barracks, or the topography of a camp might have shaped their experience and your understanding of their narrative.

The Guiding Question

This work is organised around a single question: why did this person survive? You will explore that question across three connected assignments. The Research Proposal is where you lay out your initial hypothesis. The Long Tour Field Notes is where you gather additional evidence not in the autobiography. The Final Presentation is where you explain your conclusions and compare ideas with the class.

1. Research Proposal (20%)

The proposal does two things. It identifies your biographical subject, and it gives you a first hypothesis about why they survived.

You will gather what you can about your subject's life before, during, and after the camps. From that reading, you will propose an initial hypothesis. The usual explanations are luck, prior skills, an advantageous job, support from friends and family, or some combination of these. Look for evidence of each in the source material and say which one fits best at this stage. Your hypothesis is provisional. You will revise it in the field, and revise it again when you sit down to write the final presentation.

2. The "Long Tour": Interpretative Field Notes (20%)

As you visit historical sites in Krakow, you will keep field notes throughout the week. These are more than descriptions of what you see. The aim is to record what the place tells you that the autobiography cannot: the distances, the layout, the sight lines, the textures, the proximities. The field gives you evidence the book does not, and that evidence will sometimes confirm your hypothesis and sometimes complicate it.

3. Final Presentation (20%)

The final presentation is your best answer to the question: why did this person survive? You will present it in 10 minutes of slides, followed by a short Q&A with the class.

By this point you will have your hypothesis from the proposal and a body of evidence from the field. The presentation is where you bring those together and argue for your conclusion. The Q&A is where you compare ideas with classmates working on different subjects.  

AI Statement:

How you use AI changes from assignment to assignment. Each assignment in Canvas tells you what AI is for at that stage. Some make heavy use of it, some ask you to set it aside, and one does not use it at all.

AI often invents facts, names, and dates. Check anything specific against the readings before you rely on it.

Every submission must include a short note: which AI tool you used, what you asked, and what you took from it. This is required even when you did not use AI.  

If anything is unclear, ask me before you submit.