“Constructing Memories through Photographs: Comparing Nazi Germany Images of Jewish Ghettos and U.S. Army Images of Hiroshima-Nagasaki”
Professional Background
Dr. Ariko Kato is Associate Professor at Nagoya University of Foreign Studies (Japan). She received her PhD and master’s degree in interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, as well as her bachelor’s degree in Arts, from The University of Tokyo (Japan). Dr. Kato has authored many articles on the 20th century Polish literature and the avant-garde movement in Lviv and neighboring areas of the interwar period. Her main publications include Bruno Schulz: From Eyes to Hands (2012, in Japanese, the Polish translation in preparation), which received the Award of the Association for Studies of Culture and Representation in Japan. She is editor/co-editor of the book Pamięć o II wojnie światowej w Polsce i Japonii. Holokaust i Hiroszima w perspektywie porównawczej [Memory of World War II in Poland and Japan: The Holocaust and Hiroshima in Comparative Perspectives], published in Polish and Japanese, respectively (2020). Dr. Kato translated from Polish to Japanese Zofia Nałkowska’s Medalions and Debora Vogel’s Akacias Blooming (partly from Yiddish), the last of which is nominated to the 6th Best Translation Prize in Japan in 2020. She serves on the editorial committee of Schulz / Forum, a journal specializing in scholarly articles on the works and life of Bruno Schulz, published in Poland.
Fellowship Research
Dr. Kato was awarded a 2019-2020 Robert A. Savitt Fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies for her research project, “Constructing Memories through Photographs: Comparing Nazi Germany Images of Jewish Ghettos and U.S. Army Images of Hiroshima-Nagasaki.” During her tenure at the Mandel Center, Dr. Kato will examine the role of photographs, especially those in color, in the construction of memories after the Holocaust and events of World War II. To this end, Dr. Kato compares Nazi photographs of Jewish ghettos with images after the atomic attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki taken by the United States Army, both of which have similar technical and historical backgrounds. Drawing upon Museum’s resources, including color photographs of the Litzmannstadt Ghetto taken by Walter Genewein, as well as photos of the Warsaw Ghetto from The Stroop Report, Dr. Kato assesses the impact of color images of past war events on contemporary viewers and determines national differences in the reception of these images. Focusing on both the production and the representation of the photographs taken at similar times but of different events, her project aims to demonstrate how collective memories of a single event are entangled with memories of other events during World War II.