Specialization:
Narrative, Holocaust Studies; Trauma Studies; War and Literature
Education:
Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, 1988
Bio:
Susan Derwin is the Director of UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and Professor of German and Comparative Literature. For the last five years, her teaching and writing have been devoted to the issues of social reintegration confronting military veterans and to publicly-engaged humanities. She is founding director of the University of California Veterans Summer Writing Workshop and of Foundations in the Humanities, a correspondence program for incarcerated individuals operating in multiple California prisons. She is the author of The Ambivalence of Form: Lukács, Freud, and the Novel and Rage Is the Subtext: Readings in Holocaust Literature and Film, as well as essays on trauma, psychoanalysis and literature, moral injury, and narrative healing.
Courses:
Professor Derwin teaches courses on representations of the Holocaust, humanities in times of torture, contemporary European literature, and literary theory, with an emphasis on psychoanalysis. She recently created and taught a creative writing workshop, affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, for veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who want to write about their military experiences. http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/public-humanities/uc-vww/