Northwestern College history prof attends seminar on Holocaust

 Dr. Michael Kugler, professor of history at Northwestern College, was recently invited to attend the 2017 Jack and Anita Hess seminar presented by the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Twenty individuals in the field of academia from across the United States were invited to attend the seminar as Hess Scholars. Led by Dr. Dagmar Herzog, history professor at City University of New York, and Dr. Annette Timm, associate professor of history at the University of Calgary, participants read and discussed a range of recent scholarship on sexuality and gender during the Holocaust. Topics covered included prewar persecution and women’s vulnerability; representations of masculinity and femininity in Nazi rhetoric; public shaming; forced sterilization; and how Nazi gender norms and perceptions of sexuality influenced the persecution of Jews under German control.

“We learned about the Nazi state’s assaults on women, the disabled and homosexuals, as well as the much better known racist policies against Europe’s Jewish population,” said Kugler. “The seminar was designed to help us work together to develop new ways to incorporate this subject and appropriate readings into college-level courses.”

The Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar is offered annually for college and university faculty who are teaching Holocaust-related courses. The seminar is endowed by David and Edward Hess in memory of their parents, Jack and Anita, who believed in the power of education to overcome racial and religious prejudice. 

A graduate of Judson Baptist College, Kugler primarily teaches European history from the Reformation through modern era. He earned a master’s degree from Western Washington University and a doctorate from the University of Chicago.