Contact:
Elizabeth Blevins, Director, Office of Communications
Phyllis Noah, Communications Coordinator
Office: (740) 351-3810; FAX: (740) 351-3179; Cell: (740) 464-4854
940 Second Street – Portsmouth, Ohio 45662
E-mail: eblevins@shawnee.edu or pnoah@shawnee.edu
Web site: www.shawnee.edu

            Meet and hear from Holocaust scholars and watch brutally graphic and heartbreakingly poignant film footage of the Holocaust before and during World War II in an intensive one-week study of the Holocaust at Shawnee State University. The workshop is scheduled 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 2 through Thursday, Aug. 6 where students learn to pursue a new and better humanity.
            Participants may register for one, two or three hours of graduate credit awarded by Ohio University or three semester undergraduate credit hours through SSU. The workshop may also be taken as a non-credit class through SSU University Outreach Services for a fee of $259. The cost of graduate credit hours is $120 for one credit hour; $210 for two credit hours; and $300 for three credit hours.
            Students are encouraged to pursue individual projects about the Holocaust, projects that might range from future lesson plans for teachers taking the course to personal genealogical studies. Over the years, nearly 500 people have taken the workshop. Many have reported experiences that they themselves have called transforming.
            The instructors are Herbert Hochhauser, emeritus professor at Kent State University, Thomas Piontek, assistant professor of English at SSU, and Tom Sorosiak, adjunct faculty member at Bowling Green State University.
            Hochhauser was born in Berlin, Germany, and survived the war in unoccupied France and Switzerland, coming to the United States in 1948. He produced 10 television documentaries about the Holocaust that aired on PBS. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Emmys to six of the films.
            Piontek, was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and did his undergraduate work in Germany and England. He is the author of a book on gender and sexuality studies and numerous articles, book chapters and encyclopedia entries on a wide range of topics, including literature, cultural studies, and pedagogy. He and Scott Minar are working on a manuscript for a book of bilingual poems as a paean to Paul Celan, a German-speaking Romanian Jew whose family was killed by the Nazis and he was one of the major poets of the post-WWII era.
            Sorosiak, a Fulbright Scholar and Atlantik-Brucke Fellow, was a social studies teacher for public schools and also taught at the collegiate level. He presents seminars for teachers and at social studies conferences on the topics of the Holocaust and contemporary Germany. In 2008, he was awarded the Cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesverdienstkreuz) from President Horst Kohler of the Federal Republic of Germany.
            For more information or to register, call Ginnie Moore, director, Outreach Services at (740) 351-3274 or toll free at (866) 672-8778.