Keynote Speaker: Liliane Weissberg

Keynote Address: "At Court: Holocaust Testimonies and the Problem of Witnessing"

Liliane Weissberg is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts & Sciences, and Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research deals with German-Jewish Studies, but she has also written on the German Enlightenment, European and American Romanticism, German realism, and visual studies. Weissberg has taught as a visiting professor at universities in the United States, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and has held appointments as the Ernst Cassirer Professor in Philosophy at the University of Hamburg, the Kurt Brühl Professor in Jewish Studies at the University of Graz, and the Franz Rosenzweig Professor at the University of Kassel. Weissberg is the recipient of numerous awards, including the American ACLS, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Fellowships and the German Alexander von Humboldt Prize for her life's work. Among her book publications are a critical edition of Hannah Arendt's Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1997), Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity (with Dan Ben-Amos, 1999),  Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (with J. Gerald Kennedy, 2001), and Hannah Arendt, Charlie Chaplin und die verborgene jüdische Tradition (2009).