NEW!
Summer of 2026
Unsettling Memories:
Slavery and Holocaust Memorialization in Transatlantic Perspective
Faculty Leaders: Dr. Woody Register & Dr. Liesl Allingham
Dates: May 11 – June 6, 2026
Locations: Sewanee/Alabama & Berlin, Germany
Credits: 4
Program Overview
What should we remember about our nations’ past, and what stories do nations want us to remember — or forget?
Unsettling Memories invites students to explore these questions about how communities in the United States and Germany confront the legacies of racial violence and genocide. The four-week course begins in Sewanee and the U.S. South, where you will examine sites tied to slavery and segregation, and continues in Berlin—the capital of Germany and a global center for memorial culture—where you will study how Germany remembers the Holocaust through its monuments, museums, and public spaces.
Through close observation, discussion, and travel, you’ll investigate how history is told, who gets to tell it, and how memory fuels public debate today.
Why This Course
Travel from the Tennessee mountains to the streets of Berlin.
- Stand beneath the Brandenburg Gate, walk along surviving pieces of the Berlin Wall, and discover how Berlin’s streets themselves remember the past.
- Explore Nashville and Montgomery, and places in between, where history, activism, and art collide in today’s most powerful memorial spaces.
- Meet artists, historians, and activists working to change how nations remember.
- Discover how monuments, museums, and public debates keep the past alive—and why it matters today.
Locations
Sewanee & the U.S. South – Explore Sewanee’s own memory landscape, Nashville’s Fort Negley, and the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
Berlin, Germany – Walk through a city transformed by remembrance. Visit the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Topography of Terror, and local Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) that mark Holocaust victims’ last chosen homes.
Academic Credit
HIST XXX: Unsettling Memories: Slavery and Holocaust Memorialization in Transatlantic Perspective. (4 credits)
An interdisciplinary examination of how people in two nations confront the legacies of violence through public memory, commemoration, and cultural debate in the past and present. Focusing on responses to the Holocaust in Germany and slavery’s legacies in the United States, students analyze monuments, landscapes, museums, and public discourse through site visits in Tennessee, Alabama, and Berlin. Informed by the study of memoir, theory, journalism, and public history as well as in-person visits to memorial sites, they examine how memory is or has been constructed, contested, and mobilized, and how artists, activists, scholars, and ordinary citizens intervene in dominant narratives to reimagine historical responsibility and shape collective understanding of the past.
This 4-credit course counts toward:
- History major/minor (elective at or above the 200 level)
- International and Global Studies major/minor (elective, attributes ITGS and ITGP)
- German and German Studies major/minor (elective, attribute GEEL)
- No prerequisites; all majors are welcome.
Information Sessions
Gailor 212
- Tuesday, November 11 @ 7 p.m.
- Tuesday, December 2 @ 7 p.m.
Meet the faculty, learn about travel plans, and ask questions about funding and applications.
How to Apply
Interested students can submit the short interest form here:
🔗 Unsettling Memories Interest Form ↗️
Scholarship funding is available.
Questions? Contact Dr. Allingham: lialling@sewanee.edu
