Holocaust and Genocide Studies Concentration

Undergraduate Concentration

The Holocaust and other genocides are studied to enhance our understanding of the society from which we came, the society in which we live, and the society to which we currently are giving shape. By studying the Holocaust and genocide, we learn about collusion and resistance; about the hot violence of mass murder and the cold violence of the modern, bureaucratic machinery of death; and about suffering and adaptation to suffering. We learn how societies disintegrate, step by step, and how ordinary men, women, and children both participate in and are affected by this disintegration. We learn, in short, a tremendous amount about what we need to know now to help us make the world a better place, wherever we might be.

The undergraduate concentration in Holocaust and Genocide Studies provides students with solid grounding in this interdisciplinary field.  Students take a series of courses in a variety of disciplines to ensure a critical and sophisticated understanding of the various facets of these atrocities. The undergraduate program of study encompasses history, sociology, political science, geography, international development, psychology and literature.

For more information, please visit the Holocaust and Genocide Studies Department’s website.

1. Select one of the following two core requirements:

• SOC 130 Genocide  or HIST 130 Introduction to History of Genocide 

2. Choose four of the following electives:

• CMLT 109 - Human Rights and Literature
• GERM 250 - German Film and the Frankfurt School
• GERM 286 - German-Jewish Culture and Modern Multiculturalism
• HGS 220 - Genocide and Civil War in the African Great Lakes Region
• HGS 268 - Special Topics in Genocide
• Hist 125 - Genocides, Ethnic Cleansings, and Forced Deportations in the Twentieth Century: The Balkans and the Middle East
• HIST 135 - History of Armenia
• HIST 165 - Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
• HIST 175 - Holocaust: Agency and Action
• HIST 230 - The Topics in Genocide in Comparative Perspective
• ID 105 - Visualizing Human Rights: Culture, Law, and the Politics of Representation
• MUSC 219 - From Wagnerism to Nazism: the grandeur and catastrophe of German music
• PSCI 093 - International Human Rights
• PSCI 104 - Politics of Ethnicity and Identity
• PSCI 214 - Mass Murder and Genocide Under Communism
• PSCI 240 - Human Rights and International Politics
• PSYC 171 - Social Psychology of Intergroup Violence, Oppression, and Liberation
• PSYC 225 - Research on Collective Victimization and Oppression
• PSYC 241 - The Psychology of Resistance during Genocide

3. Choose one of the following capstone seminars:

*Note: If students take more than one capstone, then the additional seminar will count as an elective.

• HGS 225 - Genocide Prevention and Conflict Transformation
• HGS 265 - Special Topics in Holocaust
• HIST 236 - Gender, War and Genocide in 20th Century
• HIST 237 - The Holocaust Perpetrators
• HIST 261 - Borderlands: Violence and Coexistence
• HIST 262 - Genocide, Denial, Facing History and Reconciliation
• HIST 266 - Refugees
• HIST 276 - Collective Memory and Mass Violence
• HIST 279 - Massacres, Genocide and Humanitarian Intervention: Western Powers in the Balkans and the Middle East
• ID 243 - Seeing Like a Humanitarian Agency
• ID 291 - Refugees, Forced Migration, and Belonging
• PSCI 287 - Refugees, Migrants, and the Politics of Displacement
• PSYC 264 - Social and Cultural Psychology of Genocides
• PSYC 278 - The Aftermath of Intergroup Violence: Social Psychological Perspectives