On August 21, 2022, Irene Kacandes, the Dartmouth Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature, will give the keynote address for Summer School 2022 in Feldthurns, Italy, the home of former Max Kade professor (2009, 2021), dramatist, novelist, essayist, and Summer School Südtirol founder and organizer Maxi Obexer. The South Tirol is a German-speaking area in northern Italy.
The topic of this year's Summer School for young dramatists is "Trauma and Drama: When the Wounds Continue: Consequences of Injustice and Violence." Kacandes was invited as recent editor of and contributor to the pathbreaking volume On Being Adjacent to Historical Violence (De Gruyter Verlag, 2022), written in response to the cauldron of crises that started boiling over in 2020. Kacandes was interviewed by journalists Maria Lobis and Judith Rifeser about the mechanisms of trauma, PTSD, what factors can make individuals more susceptible to being traumatized, and how trauma can get passed from one generation to another, something Kacandes investigated in her 2009 paramemoir, Daddy's War: Greek American Stories (U Nebraska P, 2009, 2012). Among other topics, Kacandes explains what Maria P. Root has called "insidious trauma," where factors like racism, poverty, gender discrimination, sexuality, and previous exposure to trauma can make an individual more susceptible to developing PTSD when subjected to further stressors. The interview first appeared in print in the Straßenzeitung zebra. You can read it in the online magazine Barfuss