1st Edition
Wounded Scholar, Healing Witness The Value of Life Writing in Coping with Traumas
Introduction: Wounded Scholar, Healing Witness
Idit Gil and Stefanie Hofer
1. ‘I Hope You and Your Loved Ones Remain Safe’: Dispatch from a Teacher-Scholar-Life Writer in Wartime
Ilana M. Blumberg
2. Kinship in Darkness: On the Humanities’ Intrinsic Potential to Foster Post-Traumatic Healing
Stefanie Hofer
3. On the Memory of Birds: A Meditation on Memory and Mourning AIDS Deaths in South Africa
Annette Wentworth
4. Inventing Reality: An Integration of Autobiographical Fiction with Jungian Psychoanalysis to Negotiate a Personal Experience of Trauma
Rachel Newsome
5. Between the Personal and the History: Writing a Biography in the First Person
Idit Gil
6. Trauma and Healing through Postgenerational Holodomor Survivor Research
Elise Westin
7. Torn Bodies: Inner Conflicts of Surviving Composers
Yumi Notohara
8. Scriptotherapy: WW2 Shanghai Female Refugees’ Memoirs
Arleen Ionescu
9. On Witnessing, the Responsibility of Transmitting, and the Healing Powers of Creativity. An Interview with the Jewish-Argentine Artist Mirta Kupferminc
Stefanie Hofer
Biography
Idit Gil is the academic director of the MA program of Interdisciplinary Democracy Studies at the Open University of Israel, Ra'anana, Israel. Specialising in Holocaust studies, her research focuses on the intricacies of history, memory, and societal and political dynamics. Her scholarly works about Jewish forced labour, survivor testimonies, and the complexities of Holocaust memory in Israeli society have been featured in publications such as Lessons and Legacies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Yad Vashem Studies, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Modern Judaism, Israel Studies, and ITS Jahrbuch. She is also the author of the book, The Holocaust: Between the Personal and the History (2017 [Hebrew]).
Stefanie Hofer is Associate Professor of German in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures at Virginia Tech, USA. She has published on contemporary German literature and cinematic depictions of Germany’s struggle to come to terms with Nazi atrocities and leftwing terrorism. Her current research focuses on the role of autobiographical narratives in posttraumatic healing. Drawing from her own experiences after the murder of her husband during the 16 April 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech, USA, she argues that analysing literary and filmic depictions of loss and trauma across time and cultures can serve as a catharsis for grieving and, ultimately, provide a self-determined space for working through trauma. Her work has appeared in scholarly venues such as American Imago, German Life and Letters, Film Criticism, Film International, Seminar, and Women in German Yearbook.
