Dr. Sandrine Sanos, Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi spoke at our February 1, 2020, meeting held on the East Campus of Del Mar College at 10:30 a.m.  Dr. Sanos earned her Ph.D. from Rutgers University in Modern European History, and her research interests include women’s history and modern French and European history.   Her topic was “Memory’s Histories and Post-Holocaust Aesthetics: Cultural Imaginaries of Violence during the Algerian War, 1959-62.”

Dr. Sanos discussed several French films and photographs that have shaped and become representations of memories of the time.  In one film, Kapo, the protagonist is a 14-year-old Jewish girl who experienced the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp.  The film is considered a quasi-documentary that critics labeled a sufficient historical reconstruction, depicting sexual violence as leading to the moral degradation of the heroine.  Dr. Sanos discussed how female characters in these films became the allegories of the immorality of war, while the irony is that the French were still hesitant in recognizing their own complicity in the deportation of French Jews during the war.