Date: September 17, 2025, 2:00 p.m.

Location:  Landshuter Str. 4, R. 017, Regensburg, 93047

Speaker: John C. Swanson (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga)

Organizer: Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), Regensburg, University of Regensburg, “Denkraum Ukraine” / “Think Space Ukraine”, funded by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) with funds from the Federal Foreign Office (AA)

Language: English

About the Project

The aim of this project is to write a triple biography of Lili Jacob (the woman who found the Auschwitz Album in 1945), her home village of Bilky (formerly in Hungary, now part of modern-day Ukraine), and the album itself (which contains the only photographs of Jews arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau). This project investigates life on a local level through the voices of specific individuals, places, and things. John C. Swanson’s documents, images, conversations, and experiences allow him to complicate as well as complement more established narratives of the Holocaust, Eastern and Central Europe, and the modern world.

John C. Swanson

John C. Swanson is a historian of modern Central and Eastern Europe and a professor of European history at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. His last book, Tangible Belonging: Negotiating Germanness in Twentieth-Century Hungary, won the ASEEES Barbara Jelavich Book Prize as well as the Hungarian Studies Book Prize. It was translated into German as Fassbare Zugehörigkeit: Deutschsein im Ungarn des 20. Jahrhunderts in 2020. He is also the author of The Remnants of the Habsburg Monarchy: Shaping Modern Austria and Hungary, 1918-1922).

Photo credits: Dóra Ivett Varga.