Jewish Women's Graphic Novels About the Holocaust
Moderator
Rachel E. Perry, PhD is guest curator of HBI's 2026 exhibition,Who Will Draw Our History? Women’s Graphic Narratives of the Holocaust, 1944-1949. Perry received her doctorate in Art History at Harvard University and teaches visual culture in the Weiss-Livnat Holocaust Studies program at the University of Haifa and at Gratz College. Her research focuses on the representation and memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War in the visual arts of the immediate postwar period. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty, the National Gallery, the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Yad Vashem, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. Her articles have appeared in October, History and Memory, Holocaust Studies: a Journal of Culture and History, French Cultural Studies, RIHA, Art Bulletin and Ars Judaica, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. As a curator, she has mounted exhibitions and authored catalogues such as Arrivals, Departures: Salvaged Art Works by Persecuted Jewish Artists in Paris at the Hecht Museum. She has published widely on visual ethics, Yizkor books, found footage, reproduction, reenactment, graphic novels and visual testimony. She recently edited a special issue of The Journal of Holocaust Research on early Holocaust exhibitions. While in residency at HBI, Perry worked on her current manuscript on which Who Will Draw Our History? is based.
Speakers
Victoria Aarons, PhD holds the position of O.R. and Eva Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature in the English Department at Trinity University in San Antonio, where she teaches courses on American Jewish and Holocaust literatures. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, she is the author or editor of 14 books, including Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory, (Rutgers University Press, 2019); Memory Spaces: Visualizing Identity in Jewish Women’s Graphic Narratives (Wayne State University Press, 2023), recipient of the 2024 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in Jews and the Arts: Music, Performance, Visual; and The Story’s Not Over: Jewish Women and Embodied Selfhood in Graphic Narratives (Wayne State 2025). Aarons serves as judge for the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, a literary prize given each year to a rising American Jewish writer of fiction. She is on the editorial board of Philip Roth Studies, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Partial Answers, and Women in Judaism, and she is series editor for Bloomsbury/Lexington Studies in Jewish Literature.
Tahneer Oksman, PhD is a writer, teacher, and scholar. She is the author of “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Columbia University Press, 2016), co-editor, with Nancy K. Miller, of a book of mostly first-person essays, Feminists Reclaim Mentorship: An Anthology (SUNY Press, 2023), and co-editor of a multi-disciplinary Special Issue of Shofar: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, titled “What’s Jewish About Death?”. She also writes cultural journalism for NPR, WaPo, and others. Oksman is a member of the HBI Academic Advisory Committee that conducts evaluations of proposals submitted to the HBI Research Awards Program.
Charlotte Schallié, PhD is a professor of Germanic Studies in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Victoria in Canada and Project Lead and Co-Director of The Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives Project. Her areas of interest include memory studies, visual culture studies, Holocaust education, care ethics, and arts-based research. She also edited the award-winning collection of graphic novels But I Live. Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust (University of Toronto Press, 2022), co-edited, Two Roses: A Story of Deception and Determination in Nazi Germany (University of Toronto Press, February 2026) by Miriam Libicki and Rose Lipszyc, and co-edited, Emmie Arbel. The Colour of Memory (SelfMadeHero, March 2026) by Barbara Yelin. Schallié is a member of the HBI Academic Advisory Committee that conducts evaluations of proposals submitted to the HBI Research Awards Program.