Geographies of the Holocaust

FAIN: FT-58875-11

Anne Kelly Knowles
President and Fellows of Middlebury College (Middlebury, VT 05753-6004)

I seek NEH support to edit a book of essays presenting the results of a three-year experimental project testing the feasibility and value of using geographical methods, particularly GIS, to study the Holocaust. This interdisciplinary project is the first to take a systematic, explicitly geographical approach to Holocaust studies. Our six case studies apply diverse methods to explore the many scales of this pivotal historical event, from the continental scale of the SS concentration camp system to the individual scale of evacuees from Auschwitz. The book also breaks new ground in GIScience as a close collaboration between geographers and historians. Core geographical ideas such as operational scale, control of space, and the creation and destruction of place gain new resonance in the context of the Holocaust, while applying geographic analysis and geovisualization to Holocaust sources raises new research questions. The book charts a course for a new generation of Holocaust scholarship.