John C. Swanson

My project tells the stories of the people we see in the photographs in the Auschwitz Album (Lili’s Album) via a triple biography of Lili Jacob, her home village of Bilky, and the Album itself. There are big questions concerning the Holocaust as well as the ever-changing conditions of our modern world (secularization, as well as religious revival, urbanization, as well as rural transformation, mass politics, democratization, homogenization and discrimination) that guide the stories and the general narrative, but the methodology I follow is microhistory (overlapping with forms of cultural history and biography). I am interested in how individual people, such as Lili experienced and understood what was happening around them and to them, as well as how they understood their home and objects, such as photographs. My goal is to share “the fundamental experiences and mentalités of ordinary people”— a goal of many microhistorians.

 Website: https://www.utc.edu/directory/bzd613-history-john-swanson/bzd613