Dept of German Studies
Building 260, Room 204
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2030

(650) 723-0413 (650) 725-8421
0
Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies
Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor of German Studies
Eshel.jpg MA, PhD

Amir Eshel is Edward Clark Crossett Professor of Humanistic Studies. He is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature and as of 2019 Director of Comparative Literature and its graduate program. His Stanford affiliations include The Taube Center for Jewish Studies, Modern Thought & Literature, and The Europe Center at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the faculty director of Stanford’s research group on The Contemporary and of the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA). His research focuses on contemporary literature and the arts as they touch on philosophy, specifically on memory, history, political thought, and ethics.

Amir Eshel is the author of Poetic Thinking Today (Stanford University Press, 2019); German translation at Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020). Previous books include Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past (The University of Chicago Press in 2013). The German version of the book, Zukünftigkeit: Die zeitgenössische Literatur und die Vergangenheit, appeared in 2012 with Suhrkamp Verlag. Together with Rachel Seelig, he co-edited The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange (2018). In 2014, he co-edited with Ulrich Baer a book of essays on Hannah Arendt, Hannah Arendt: zwischen den Disziplinen; and also co-edited a book of essays on Barbara Honigmann with Yfaat Weiss, Kurz hinter der Wahrheit und dicht neben der Lüge (2013).

Earlier scholarship includes the books Zeit der Zäsur: Jüdische Lyriker im Angesicht der Shoah (1999), and Das Ungesagte Schreiben: Israelische Prosa und das Problem der Palästinensischen Flucht und Vertreibung (2006). Amir Eshel has also published essays on Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Paul Celan, Dani Karavan, Gerhard Richter, W.G. Sebald, Günter Grass, Alexander Kluge, Barbara Honigmann, Durs Grünbein, Dan Pagis, S. Yizhar, and Yoram Kaniyuk.

Amir Eshel’s poetry includes a 2018 book with the artist Gerhard Richter, Zeichnungen/רישומים, a work which brings together 25 drawings by Richter from the clycle 40 Tage and Eshel’s bi-lingual poetry in Hebrew and German. In 2020, Mossad Bialik brings his Hebrew poetry collection בין מדבר למדבר, Between Deserts.

Amir Eshel is a recipient of fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt and the Friedrich Ebert foundations and received the Award for Distinguished Teaching from the School of Humanities and Sciences.

Affiliated faculty of The Europe Center
Affiliated faculty of The Taube Center for Jewish Studies
Faculty Director of The Contemporary Research Group
Faculty Director of the Poetic Media Lab
CV
-

Encina Hall, Ground Floor, East Wing, Room E008

Ely Karmon International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), Herzlyia, Israel
Seminars
Paragraphs

Using firsthand personal accounts and focusing on the experiences of women, Katherine R. Jolluck relates and examines the experiences of thousands of civilians deported to the USSR following the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland in 1939. Upon arrival in remote areas of the Soviet Union, they were deposited in prisons, labor camps, special settlements, and collective farms, and subjected to tremendous hardships and oppressive conditions. In 1942, some 115,000 Polish citizens - only a portion of those initially exiled from their homeland - were evacuated to Iran. There they were asked to complete extensive questionnaires about their experiences. Having read and reviewed hundreds of these documents, Jolluck reveals not only the harsh treatment these women experienced, but also how they maintained their identities as respectable women and patriotic Poles. She finds that for those exiled, the ways in which they strove to recreate home in a foreign and hostile environment became a key means of their survival. Both a harrowing account of brutality and suffering and a clear analysis of civilian experiences in wartime, Exile and Identity expands the history of war far beyond the military battlefield.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Books
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
University of Pittsburgh Press
Authors
Katherine Jolluck
Number
9780822941859
Paragraphs

Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe presents research Professor Norman Naimark conducted while working at the Forum on Contemporary Europe (FCE) on cases of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and forced migrations in five cases including Armenians in Turkey, Chechens-Ingush and Crimean Tatars in the USSR, Bosnian Muslims and Albanian Kosovars in the Yugoslav lands, as well as Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe, and Germans in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Such historical comparison dislodges common assumptions to reveal patterns of our modern world.

Without losing sight of relative magnitude or original aggressor, Naimark clarified that crimes occurred in all the above cases, and sets details of atrocities ordered by authoritarian regimes alongside evidence of ethnic cleansing enabled by Europe's democratic powers. In the example of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Naimark demonstrates that the Serbian ethnic-cleansing campaign, with concentration camps and raping of Bosnian Muslim women, had their precedents in ethnic-cleansing campaigns during World War II. Media images of the Serbian camps shocked EU and U.S. audiences, and rightly so; but publics and political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic may read in Naimark's work the importance of a fuller historical record.

Naimark's comparison presents evidence for his argument that these instances of ethnic cleansing are "interconnected and embedded in the European 20th century." The notion of interconnected atrocity, with points of comparison across nationalities, ideologies, and territories, leads to provocative insight. Throughout 20th century Europe, victims and perpetrators could become perpetrators and victims. Naimark clearly distinguishes between original aggressors and victims, and does not blur the scale of Nazi atrocity with other modern war crimes. But his research demonstrates that the division of Europeans into fixed categories of victims and perpetrators, and the politics of peace-keeping based on these identities, must be tested against Naimark's seasoned and influential scholarship.

As a work of illuminating history, Fires of Hatred has a history of its own. Naimark has injected penetrating scholarship into Europe's politicized debates over history and memory of World War II. Since its publication in English, some of Europe's political commentators have sought to defend their versions of postwar history with which they identify, against the complex details of Naimark's work. Naimark himself has granted numerous interviews with European journalists seeking his help to set their record straight. Demand in Europe for Naimark's work is finally being met. Five years since it first appeared in English, Fires of Hatred has been translated into Italian, Czech, Russian, Croatian, and German. Further translations are undoubtedly in the works.

FCE is dedicated to consequential thinking about Europe in the new millennium, and Professor Naimark exemplifies the beneficial impact of our programs for public dissemination of Stanford research.

All Publications button
1
Publication Type
Books
Publication Date
Journal Publisher
Harvard University Press
Authors
Norman M. Naimark
Number
9780674009943
Subscribe to Middle East and North Africa