James E. Young
James E. Young is Distinguished University Professor of English and Judaic Studies Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the Founding Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at UMass Amherst. Young has also taught at New York University as a Dorot Professor of English and Hebrew/Judaic Studies (1984-88), at Bryn Mawr College in the History of Religion, and at the University of Washington, Harvard University, and Princeton University as a visiting professor. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Cruz in 1983.
A recognized authority on Holocaust memory and memorials, Professor Young was the Guest Curator of an exhibition at The Jewish Museum in New York City, entitled “The Art of Memory: Holocaust Memorials in History” (March - August 1994, with venues in Berlin and Munich, September 1994 - June 1995) and was the editor of The Art of Memory (Prestel Verlag, 1994), the exhibition’s catalogue.
FEATURED WORK & CORE COMPETENCIES
Scholarship on the creation and evolving meaning of memorials, monuments, Holocaust narratives and art
Juror for international memorial design competitions
Curating exhibitions
Author of books offering critical analysis of how monuments convey meaning and how art and narrative are influenced by remembrance of traumatic history, including:
Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust (Indiana University Press, 1988)
The Texture of Memory (Yale University Press, 1993), which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1994
At Memory’s Edge: After-images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (Yale University Press, 2000)
The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between (University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), which won the National Council for Public History Book Award for 2017
In 1997, he 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, finished and dedicated in May 2005. In 2003, he was appointed to the jury for the “National 9/11 Memorial” design competition, won by Michael Arad and Peter Walker in 2004 and opened on September 11, 2011. He has also consulted closely on Norway’s July 22 Memorial process and served on multiple memorial design teams.
Professor Young has written widely on public art, memorials, and national memory. His articles, reviews, and Op-Ed essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Book Review, and Op-Ed pages, The Chicago Tribune, The Forward, and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among other newspapers.
Scholarly journals include Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, PMLA, Partisan Review, The Yale Journal of Criticism, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Slate, among dozens of other journals and collected volumes.
Professor Young is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEH Exhibition planning, implementation, and research grants, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Grants, an American Philosophical Society Grant, and a Yad Hanadiv Fellowship at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, among others.