Open Public Lecture with Professor Wendy Lower: Portraying atrocity photography and human rights

Professor Wendy Lower will explore the impact of shocking images as visual testimony of war and genocide, and as a galvanizing force in the human rights revolution before, during and after the Holocaust. Atrocity photographs are used as evidence in criminal investigations, but they are also creative expressions of perpetrators, victims and bystanders, as documents of violence, suffering and resistance. How do we make sense of them and use them? Have singular images lost their power to inspire humanitarian action in the age of social media and fake news?

Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College and directs the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College (CA, USA). She chairs the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and has published several books on the Holocaust in Ukraine including Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (2005), and co- editor (with Ray Brandon) of Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization (2008). Her work on gender and the Holocaust, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Award and has been translated into 23 languages. Lower’s The Ravine: A Family, A Photograph, A Holocaust Massacre Revealed (2021) received the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category and was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize and longlisted for a PEN. She is currently co-authoring a study of Himmler’s Last Days and the Fate of Genocidaires.

The lecture is organized by Lund University’s Human Rights Profile Area and the Department of History where Wendy Lower is a guest researcher during spring 2025.