Barry Trachtenberg HI Tenth Anniversary Tribute

Since arriving to Wake Forest in 2016, the Humanities Institute has played a pronounced and, really profound role throughout all areas of my professional life. I consider the Institute as one my intellectual homes at the university — as a site for some of the most consistently engaging and insightful conversations that I’ve had here. I’ve also turned to it repeatedly for support for a number of projects.

When I served as director of the Jewish Studies program for its first three years, I quickly came to count upon the Humanities Institute as a reliable partner in our public programming. This included much needed help to support our events, including our inaugural lecture in 2017 with historian Cheryl Greenberg and our 2018 roundtable on Antisemitism in the Age of Trump after the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. Beyond assistance with funding, the Institute was key to helping the Jewish Studies program become known around the university and the Triad region as a independent forum for critical discussions on issues central to Jews and Judaism.

The Humanities Institute has also been a friend and ally in my teaching. In 2019, the Institute provided a very generous grant to a class that I teaching called “Confronting the Holocaust.” For two weeks, twelve Wake Forest students and I traveled around Central Europe to examine the ways that different states have remembered the experience of Jews, Roma, people perceived to have been disabled, and others in the Holocaust. A generous grant from the Institute both helped make the course affordable for students and allowed us to move beyond being simply tourists and observers by making it possible to meet with European scholars. This made it possible for students to form their own critical perspectives on remembrance and commemoration and how these are shaped by the particular demands of each country. When we came back to school the following fall, the students in that course organized a panel discussion on how the American South and Wake Forest in particular might acknowledge and commemorate our own complicated histories and engagements with white supremacy and slavery.

In terms of my own research, the Humanities Institute has similarly played a critical role. In the 2018-19 academic year, I participated in a Humanities Institute seminar on the Undercommons with colleagues from across the university. Our discussions on the ways in which the academy has been complicit with – and benefits from – structures of social inequity led me to rethink the role of Jewish Studies within the larger Jewish community, and my place within it. This resulted in a keynote lecture that I gave in early 2020 at Queen’s College in Kingston Ontario on Muslim-Jewish Solidarity, which I then subsequently published.

More recently, the Institute has made it possible for me to finalize a book project in spite of this horrific pandemic that has otherwise disrupted everything. The support of the HI has provided me the time and resources necessary to work through a tremendous amount of archival material to get me over that final hurdle. A Summer Writing Grant made it possible to complete the third and final section of the manuscript and a Book Development Grant is allowing me to sent it to experts in the field prior to submitting it to my press for publication.

I could not have accomplished this work without the help of the Humanities Institute. I am so grateful. Congratulations on hitting your 10 year anniversary! I’m thrilled to be associated with the Institute and I look forward to all of your accomplishments in the next 10 years.

Barry Trachtenberg
Associate Professor of History