Date/Time
Date(s) - October 25, 2022
4:00 pm - 5:15 pm
Categories
The Department of Ethnic Studies in collaboration with the Department of History are delighted to announce the guest speaker talk, “Mobilizing Empathy: Media, Humanitarianism and the Armenian Genocide,” by Dr. Roy Knocke, an associate lecturer at the University of Potsdam and the Director of the Potsdam Lepsius House, a research center on the history of the Armenian genocide and early humanitarianism. This special event will take place next Tuesday, October 25th, 4-5:15 pm, at The Nancy Richardson Design Center, room 121. Refreshments will be provided.
Mobilizing Empathy: Media, Humanitarianism and the Armenian Genocide
Since the end of the 19th century the mobilization of empathy was a key aspect of organizing humanitarian work. After the massacres against Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire 1894-96 a massive pan-European relief campaign launched orphanages, schools, hospitals and workshops for the survivors which continued up to the interwar period. The big player in the German Empire was the “Deutscher Hilfsbund zur Linderung des Notstands in Armenien” [“The German relief organization against the crisis in Armenia”] which heavily utilized targeted advertising to generate donations. The use of different journals, pamphlets, calendar sheets, public meetings, photo shows and silent movies were all parts of a focused humanitarian fundraising campaign, especially in ecclesiastical circles. The presentation sheds light on how the German relief work used different types of media to induce a moral obligation for humanitarian help and created humanitarian subjects that rarely had any agency in the production of depictions themselves.
Dr. Roy Knocke’s Bio
Dr. phil. Roy Knocke studied philosophy and cultural studies, and is currently the director of the Potsdam Lepsius House, a research center on the history of the Armenian genocide and early humanitarianism, and an associate lecturer at the University of Potsdam in Germany. His research focuses on the history of genocides, the history of humanitarianism and the moral history of extreme political violence in the 20th century. He published on moral and socio-philosophical aspects of genocide, on Franz Werfel and the Armenian Genocide and on the origins, manifestations and aftermath of political violence in the 20th century. Currently, he is working on a four-volume annotated historic-critical edition of Johannes Lepsius’ works on the Armenian question, a key figure in the German humanitarian pro-Armenian movement.