History of the Institute
The Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at UMass Amherst opened in March 2011. The Institute was co-founded by James E. Young and Lara R. Curtis and was established initially to house the generous gift of a permanent teaching exhibition on the Holocaust, "A Reason to Remember: Roth, Germany 1933-42," donated to the University by the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts, formerly installed at Hatikvah Holocaust Education Center in Springfield. The exhibition is open to university students and the general public, as well as to visiting middle and high school student groups by appointment. A travelling version of this exhibition is available to other borrowing institutions upon request. Since its opening, the Institute and its teaching exhibition have been visited by thousands of middle school, high school, and university students, who have toured the exhibition in the company of survivors and docents.
With generous founding gifts from Pamela and Robert Jacobs of Washington, D.C., Brenda and Al Curtis of Springfield, and an anonymous local donor, the Institute continues to host monthly public lectures, conferences, screenings, university classes, and other visiting school groups.
The Institute houses a 5,000 volume library on Holocaust, genocide, Jewish history, and memory. This library has been established with generous founding gifts from Schoen Booksellers, Estate of Gaston Schmir, Herbert and Elsa Roth, James Young, and Alon Confino.
James E. Young, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of English and Judaic Studies, joined UMass in 1988. An expert on Holocaust memory and the author of numerous books, Young was appointed by the Berlin Senate to the five-member Findungskommission for Germany's national "Memorial to Europe's Murdered Jews," which selected Peter Eisenman’s design, dedicated in May 2005. He has also consulted with Argentina’s government on its memorial to the desaparacidos. In 2003, he was appointed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to the jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial competition, won by Michael Arad and Peter Walker, dedicated on September 11, 2011. Among his books are Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, The Texture of Memory , which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994, and At Memory's Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, ACLS Fellowship, and NEH.
Lara R. Curtis was the Institute’s first administrative director and held this position from its inception until 2017. Prior to joining the Institute, Curtis oversaw a curriculum project on Holocaust education for university and high school students throughout the Pioneer Valley and southern New England. Her work on this project led to a joint partnership between the UMass College of Education and the Jewish Federation of Western Massachusetts, which was one of the main incentives for the establishment of the Institute. Dr. Curtis was an officer of the Foundation for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies, which was a private organization created for the purpose of establishing the Institute during the first years of its existence. Over the years she cultivated many relationships with scholars, friends, and donors of the Institute both locally and worldwide, to ensure that it would serve as a venue for scholars and students today and in the future. Dr. Curtis is the author of Writing Resistance and the Question of Gender: Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion.
As the inaugural Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies, Alon Confino became the second director of IHGMS in 2017 and served until his passing in 2024. The author of the influential A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide, Confino was an expert on modern German and European history, the Holocaust and genocide, Zionism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Confino authored five additional books and numerous articles and book chapters. Under Confino’s leadership, the IHGMS broadened its subject matter to include genocide, mass violence, racial discrimination and other topics related to the Holocaust, including different Palestinian and Jewish experiences of the foundation of Israel in 1948, about which he was completing a book before his death. Under Confino’s directorship, he worked to broaden the topics of the Institute beyond the Holocaust to include genocide, mass violence, racial discrimination, and other topics related to the Holocaust, such as Zionism and the Nakba. He also broadened the Institute’s activities to include seminars, book talks, lectures, and webinars. These new initiatives help foster a global community of scholars. Confino also placed great importance in viewing the Institute as a place for hosting difficult and frank discussions on controversial topics and as a home for dialogue on campus.