A deportation, a battle, a sexual assault, a crash: Because a traumatic event is unbearable in its horror and intensity, it often exists as memories that are not immediately recognizable as truth. Trauma, as Cornell scholars have been on the forefront of pointing out, is the delay between experiencing something horrific and processing it in the mind and body – with ramifications for individuals, communities and whole societies.
Faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences approach trauma from many different academic disciplines, including literature, history, archaeology and psychoanalysis, to connect past events with subsequent impacts in the mind, in art, and in the historical record. Their scholarship aims to bring about greater understanding, richer documentation, justice or even – where possible – closure.
Between knowing and not knowing
Cathy Caruth, the Class of 1916 Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), pioneered the study of trauma in the humanities, an academic field that’s exploded in volume and importance in the past 30 years. Since the 1990s, she has been a leader in defining trauma from a literary, theoretical and testimonial perspective and in seeking new modes of bearing witness to trauma and human suffering that are rooted in the academic humanities. This spring, her election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences recognized her contributions as a leader in the field.
Caruth’s 1996 book “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History” is considered the pathbreaking work that pulled the exploration of trauma into the humanities and founded the field of trauma studies, along with an interdisciplinary collection she edited and introduced in 1995: “Trauma: Explorations in Memory.” Johns Hopkins Press issued a 20th anniversary edition of “Unclaimed Experience” in 2016.
Against the backdrop of the bewildering and unprecedented experience of trauma in the 20th century – in which the term “genocide” was introduced – Caruth explains that trauma is to be understood not only as the experience of a violent event: What is essential to trauma is, rather, the mind’s failure to assimilate the event as it occurs.
Inspired by Sigmund Freud, she finds that literature and psychoanalysis are both interested in the complex relationship between knowing and not knowing that is at the heart of trauma, the entanglement of the expressed and the inexpressible. Understood as the testimony to a belated experience – not blocked or forgotten – the story of trauma isn’t about an escape from reality but rather concerns its endless impact on a life, she says. It can take place on both the individual and the collective level and has implications as well for how we think about history more generally.
Caruth says she did not set out to found a field of study. Rather, her theories about trauma grew out of close readings of Freud, of literary texts and literary theory, and of film. Her theories synchronized well with research that scholar Shoshana Felman, her longtime collaborator, was doing into the importance to trauma survivors of testimony – telling their stories. Their humanities-based work resonated with clinicians and theorists working with various kinds of trauma, including Holocaust survival; Vietnam war experiences; political, social and racial violences; and sexual assault.
When Caruth shares her theories about trauma with humanities scholars, clinical practitioners, and especially with students at all levels (from first year undergraduates to advanced graduate students) connections start to fall into place, she says. One of her inaugural experiences of the interdisciplinary complexity of trauma occurred when she first attended a meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
“It was the most amazing experience,” Caruth says, “because this paradox – that on the one hand, a trauma is not experienced immediately, and on the other hand, it has the most precise, accurate, specific detail – came through on every level: the clinicians who worked with people, the neurologist who looked at brain studies, the survivors who would speak. Everyone gave some version of that.”
Caruth has worked with influential scholars and clinicians to study trauma in these arenas, including Dori Laub, a Holocaust survivor and psychoanalyst; Robert Lifton, who worked with Vietnam veterans; and Nadine Kaslow, chief psychologist of Grady Hospital in Atlanta, with whom Caruth created an archive of battered women’s testimonies. In her 2014 book “Listening to Trauma: Conversations with Leaders in the Theory and Treatment of Catastrophic Experience,” Caruth assembles interviews with these and many others.
While the field is often called “trauma studies,” Caruth resists that phrase because the word “studies” turns “everything into concepts,” she says, whereas the most profound explorations of trauma attempt to confront its challenge to preconceived modes of conceptualization.
In her teaching at Cornell, Caruth has found that an understanding of trauma gives students a foothold into difficult texts in literature courses.
“Students can relate to the complexities of text and the theoretical questions they raise because trauma isn’t only theory for them,” she says. “Most people have some contact with this.”
In 2024, she taught “Trauma Across Borders,” a comparative literature course that considered personal, collective and political trauma in a global context. Her undergraduate student Rebecca Sparacio ’24 won the M.H. Abrams prize for her class thesis, “Trauma, Testimony and Translation.”
In another interdisciplinary synthesis, Caruth co-taught “Trauma and Invention” with Lyrae van Clief Stefanon, associate professor of literatures in English (A&S). On Tuesdays, van Clief Stefanon taught poetry writing, then on Thursdays, Caruth taught trauma theory.
“We were trying to cross the boundaries between creative writing and critical thought,” Caruth says. “She would say ‘you write to think,’ and I would tell students to read theoretical texts as if they were poetry.”
The “Trauma and Invention” course was also about trauma not being the end of the story – it explored how to come out of trauma. “That was the invention part,” Caruth says.
Living testimony
Jan Burzlaff, postdoctoral associate in the Jewish Studies Program (A&S), brings perspective to testimony about trauma through his studies of the Holocaust.
“I’m a scholar of the victims of mass violence,” he says. “I’m interested not in the grand policies but rather in lived experience from the bottom up – trauma, relationships, encounters, choices and the aftermath.”
He uses Holocaust testimony as an ethnographic source, not primarily to document what survivors experienced, but to recover how ordinary people around them behaved: neighbors, doctors, landlords, police officers. The question driving his work is less ‘was this trauma?” than “what did persecution look like from the inside, at street level, in real time?”
For reasons similar to Caruth’s, Burzlaff avoids the phrase “trauma studies” because it supposes that trauma is an artifact that can be held still for examination. Instead, he says, one person’s testimony can change over time. And a body of testimony, such as that produced by video archives of Holocaust testimonies, can, over time, change a society’s beliefs.
In a recent study, Burzlaff spent a summer analyzing 500 testimonies from the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University, aided by artificial intelligence (AI). He found that survivor testimonies recorded in the United States about experiences in Poland grew more morally direct over time – not simply more accusatory, but more precise in describing the society that had surrounded them.
“The article traces not only what survivors remember, but how and why their testimony transformed – between 1979 and 1995, across borders and emotional terrains – into a sustained moral confrontation,” Burzlaff says. “In this reframing, the Holocaust was not just remembered as a German genocide in Poland but as a fundamentally Polish story.”
Testimony of past violence doesn’t only tell us what happened, it shows us how people made choices during violence and reassembled their world after it collapsed, Burzlaff says. “That’s a universal insight you can apply to [ethnic violence in] Rwanda or to Ukraine under siege. You can apply it to many contexts.”
Kora von Wittelsbach, senior lecturer of Italian language and Romance studies and an affiliate faculty member in the Jewish Studies Program (A&S), also relies on Holocaust testimony in her course JWST 2720: The World of Italian Jewry. “I regularly invite Shoah [Holocaust] survivors – Italian Jews – as guests on Zoom. They are now quite old, and students enjoy tremendously speaking with them and hearing about their experiences. Some guest speakers are writers, journalists or historians. Others have not written about their lives,” she says.
Von Wittelsbach is researching interactions between Italian Jews and Central European Jews in concentration camps during World War II. She’ll be doing archival research in Israel this summer, having been invited to participate in the Alan Cornell U.S. Campus Faculty Seminar at Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem.
Trauma and technology
Although trauma and testimony are fundamentally human experiences, technology has been used to preserve and explore stories and create its own unique form of testimony.
Burzlaff teaches a course on AI and memory – among the first of its kind in the humanities – that addresses how AI is likely to affect memory, what we can do about it, and what remains fundamentally human in listening to accounts of trauma and atrocity. This spring, the class has been exploring how trauma is remembered, reshaped and sometimes resisted through Holocaust survivor testimony, with a particular focus on the limits of AI when it comes to interpreting lived experience.
“One of the most striking patterns this semester has been how clearly students can see the gap between transcript-based analysis and the full, embodied reality of testimony on video – moments of silence, hesitation or emotional dissonance that don’t translate into text but fundamentally shape meaning,” he says.
Although human connection often comes across where technology fails, in some situations, technology testifies to trauma where humans can’t. Archaeologist Lori Khatchadourian, associate professor of Near Eastern studies and anthropology (A&S), studies satellite images as visual testimony to ongoing harms in the aftermath of war. These images shape the memory of trauma.
She’s co-founder, with Adam T. Smith, the Henry Scarborough Professor of Social Science in Anthropology (A&S), of Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW), a project that uses high-resolution satellite imagery to monitor and document endangered and damaged cultural heritage in the South Caucasus, where an ethnic conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan has raged for decades.
“The proliferation of high-resolution satellite imagery has changed the ways in which archaeologists respond to cultural heritage crises,” Khatchadourian said in a 2021 article announcing CHW’s first report. “New technologies make it possible to document damage and destruction almost in real time.” Khatchadourian’s research also explores the implications of satellite imagery for memory and historical consciousness.
Smith and Khatchadourian have also examined how the discipline of archaeology contends with the material traces of traumatic events, which often remain on the landscape and are encountered during excavations.
In “Unseeing the Past: Archaeology and the Legacy of the Armenian Genocide,” which appeared in Current Anthropology in 2022, Smith reveals how archaeology has been “a tool of unseeing.” He writes that “foreign archaeologists working in eastern Turkey have increasingly avoided the material remains of the Armenian past and the evidence of its erasure, etching genocide denial into the authoritative discourse of the discipline.”
In a forthcoming paper, Khatchadourian traces the practice of Near Eastern archaeology in northern Syria, a region strewn with makeshift concentrations camps during the Armenian genocide. She examines haunting photographs taken in the 1940s of human remains unearthed by archaeologists seeking ancient artifacts – photographs that have remained buried in the archive.
Her study, “Once Upon a Time in the Jazira: Archaeology and the Mass Graves of the Armenian Genocide,” which will appear in Current Anthropology in 2027, examines how archaeology has approached Tell Fekheriye, an ancient site in northeastern Syria. Ottoman authorities transformed the mound into a concentration camp and killing field in 1915-1916; decades later, archaeologists working there suppressed evidence of the victims’ remains, Khatchadourian writes, calling it a moral failing.
In one black and white photo from 1940, several workers dig with shovels on higher levels of a tiered mound while piles of human skulls and leg bones – cleared out of their way – lie on grass in the foreground.
Khatchadourian challenges the discipline of archaeology to rethink its “entrenched misconception of the relation between past and present.” Archaeologists, she says, have been unwitting accessories to the silencing of atrocity.
“The case underscores the urgent need for archaeology in the Middle East to reconceptualize the discipline’s relationship to landscapes of trauma,” she writes. “The history of excavations at Fekheriye shows that the modern master-trope of archaeology as a science that is concerned (obsessed even) with a remote past disconnected with the present…not only limits the discipline intellectually and constrains its societal relevance, but can also compromise its integrity and inflict moral injury to itself and to people descended from trauma.”
Archaeology is not just about ancient relics and long-ago events, she argues; it is connected to recent history and ongoing trauma. Before the Syrian civil war, Armenian pilgrims would come to this region seeking closure on the genocide their ancestors suffered by seeing the terrain, walking the land, and even collecting unidentified bones to represent their loss.
A bridge beyond trauma
In the face of unimaginable horror, words make a difference, Cornell scholars have found. Language laid down as a bridge back into and possibly out of unbearable events can shift the narrative – often for the better.
Although Burzlaff rejects what he calls the “redemption narrative” arc of “normal life, trauma and recovery,” he says testimony is nonetheless necessary for drawing the truth out of mass violence for individuals and for societies. And in the field of archaeology, Khatchadourian says she hopes “greater willingness on the part of archaeologists to take seriously the material traces of traumatic events that matter profoundly to living populations can reshape the discipline into a tool of witnessing rather than silencing.”
Caruth says that to respond effectively to trauma is not simply to reveal denied or distorted facts, but to create the conditions by which the possibility of collective social witness and response may finally take place. The scholars and clinicians she interviews in “Listening to Trauma” find a “locus of vulnerability, a place that is never fully outside, if it is also not fully inside, the traumatic experiences to which they respond,” she writes.
“But the possibility of remaining in this world in between is also the great strength of these leaders in the area of trauma," Caruth writes, “each of whom attempts to create a bridge from trauma to testimony and from denial to a future possibility of witness.”
