Michael Rothberg
Michael Rothberg
Competition: US & Canada
Michael Rothberg is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies, Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on the social and cultural implications of political violence and its afterlives, and his writings have been translated into French, German, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish. His books include The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019), Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003; co-edited with Neil Levi), and Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000). With Yasemin Yildiz, he is completing Memory Citizenship: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance. He has also written for public-facing venues such as Inside Higher Ed, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nation, as well as German-language publications such as Die Zeit, Berliner Zeitung, and Geschichte der Gegenwart. The 2021 German translation of Multidirectional Memory prompted a national debate in the mainstream press about the relationship between the Holocaust and colonialism. His Guggenheim project grows out of that experience and considers what he calls “comparison controversies,” impassioned public debates about analogies between different histories of political violence.