You never stop learning: organising a workshop on ‘Comic Strips about the Holocaust and the Second World War’

When you’re a PhD student, you never stop learning. You acquire knowledge on topics that relate specifically to your thesis, of course, but you also pick up all kinds of other general skills on a daily basis: analysing, presenting, teaching, communicating, organising, leadership and problem-solving, to name just a few.

Learning how to organise a workshop is one of the skills I developed during my time as a junior NIOD Fonds fellow. It’s an invaluable experience for anyone who is pursuing a career in academia, and it’s a lot more complicated than you might think.

In this blog post, I’ll share a number of outcomes from the workshop on ‘Comic Strips about the Holocaust and the Second World War’ that I organised during my time at NIOD. In addition, I’d like to offer some insights into the process, and what’s involved in planning a scholarly workshop. In the academic world, knowledge is all too often presented in the form of output and final products, meaning that you rarely get to see what happens behind the scenes. I would like to open up the process and give the reader some insights into the life of a researcher.

Once you’ve come up with an idea for a research workshop, you want to be sure that the content will be useful for the participants and for you and your own research. I also wanted the workshop to be of value to NIOD researchers and their interests, to add to the field of knowledge, and to make a contribution to the international research community.

Even before my fellowship in Amsterdam, I’d been struck in my research that a remarkable number of people in the Netherlands are interested in the depiction of the Holocaust in comic strip form. They include researchers like Kees Ribbens at NIOD, for example, and museum professionals based at the Anne Frank House and Westerbork.

My own research examines the use of comic strips on the Holocaust in the context of educational programmes at museums and memorial sites. That was my starting point for choosing this workshop topic, but as it’s quite a specific framework – as all doctoral projects are – I needed to broaden it to make it relevant to a larger group of attendees.

With an eye to my own research interests, NIOD and the wider Dutch community, I therefore came up with a topic that is broader yet still closely related to my PhD topic: comics about the Holocaust and the Second World War.

Research workshops are not only opportunities to explore research themes in more depth and develop ideas, but also to meet and network with people with similar interests. The possibility of networking was an important motivation for organising an in-person workshop, rather than an online one. Many of the workshop participants had never met before, despite sharing research interests. Establishing new connections and collaborations in this way can lead to joint research projects or new opportunities for collecting data.

Some of the participants had worked together before and were able to share this work with the rest of the group. One shared project that came up was But I Live, an anthology of three graphic novels about the lives of four Holocaust survivors. This international project, organised by the University of Victoria, includes project partners such as the Anne Frank House (present at the workshop), the Arolsen Archives and Yad Vashem.

Another collaboration that was discussed was the edited collection Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and the Holocaust: Beyond Maus. This book, edited by workshop participant Ewa Stańczyk, includes contributions by workshop participants Kees Ribbens and Diederik Oostdijk. It was great to see all the existing connections and collaborations between the workshop participants, and it is every workshop organiser’s dream to bring researchers together and build yet more connections.

Even a small, informal research workshop takes a lot of time to organise. As the workshop had to be organised and held within two months, there wasn’t enough time to ask participants to prepare detailed presentations on their research. To make up for this lack of time, Kees and I, as the researchers from the host institution, each gave a 20-minute presentation on our work, followed by space for questions and an open discussion. I presented one of my case studies, the comic series CHUTZ-POW!: Superheroes of the Holocaust by the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh.

Presenting and receiving feedback is an essential (if sometimes nerve-racking) part of the academic world. The feedback that you receive when presenting your research helps you to look at your topic in a new way. You get so close to your own work that it is sometimes difficult to see the wood for the trees. Presenting allows you to take a little distance, and see your topic through someone else’s eyes.

Let me give an example.

Before the workshop, I had always viewed CHUTZ-POW! as a comic book in the style of American superhero comics. That is probably because of the title, for example, and the cover of the first part. The latter shows a Jewish-Hungarian agent of the Allied intelligence service, who infiltrates the SS during the war. He is tearing open the SS uniform he is wearing to reveal a Star of David underneath – an unmistakable reference to Superman.

But some of the workshop participants spotted a discrepancy between the manner of the comic strips’ presentation, namely as superhero comic strips, and the content, which was more in line with the description of visual biographies. And indeed, the stories in the strips are true stories of liberation and resistance. They have not been embellished for the sake of the narrative form. None of the characters have supernatural powers, for example. Many of the drawings are not even in the style of American comics, as every part is a collaboration between multiple artists. Viewed as such, the CHUTZ-POW! comics are essentially anthologies of visual biographies in superhero format.

These useful comments at the workshop made me realise that I need to make a more detailed analysis of my comic-strip case studies, going into each individual aspect in more depth: the covers, the stories, the drawing styles, the artists, the writers. Only by considering all of these factors will I be able to present a complete and meaningful case study.

My experience with the NIOD workshop taught me that you never stop developing or improving, either yourself or your research project. Organising the workshop allowed me to grow as a scholar, both developing my practical skills and improving my thesis. However isolated the research process can be at times, it is crucial to remember how important collaboration and peer support can be in research, and that we can – and should – always learn from each other.

Betsy Inlow

PhD student