James Young, Distinguished University Professor of English and Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, will present Johnson State College’s 31st annual Ellsworth Lecture at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 2, in 207 Bentley Hall. Young will discuss “The Memorial Arc Between Berlin’s Denkmal and New York City’s 9/11 Memorial.”

Also known as the Holocaust Memorial, Denkmal remembers the Jewish victims of the Nazi atrocities in Europe during World War II.

Young has written widely on public art, memorials and national memory. His articles, reviews and op-ed essays have appeared in numerous newspapers, including The New York Times Magazine and The Los Angeles Times, as well as in scholarly journals such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, New Literary History, PMLA and many others.

Young’s work include  “At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture” (Yale University Press, 2000), National Jewish Book Award winner in 1994, “The Texture of Memory (Yale University Press, 1993),”, and “Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 1988)”, which won a Choice Outstanding Book Award for 1988.

He is also the recipient of other awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities Exhibition planning, implementation and research grants, and Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Grants.

He has also taught at New York University, Bryn Mawr College, at the University of Washington, Harvard University, and Princeton University as a visiting professor.

Young has worked internationally for a variety of governments and organizations.  In 1997, he was appointed by the Berlin Senate to the five-member Findungskommission for Germany’s national

“Memorial to Europe’s Murdered Jews,” dedicated in 2005.

He also worked with the Argentinian government on its memorial commemorating those who disappeared during the military regime (the desaparacidos), as well as with numerous city agencies on their memorials and museums.

Most recently, he was appointed by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to the jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial competition. .

His lecture is sponsored by the Ellsworth Trust, a private foundation established in 1983 and endowed by Professor Ellsworth. The trust enriches higher education at Johnson State through scholarships for undergraduate and graduate students, sponsorships that bring visiting scholars to campus for lectures and seminars, and other multicultural events, grants and fellowships.
The event is free and open to the public.