History department to host talk by Holocaust theatre director

Friday, February 24, 2023

Media Contact: Elizabeth Gosney | CAS Marketing and Communications Manager | 405-744-7497 | egosney@okstate.edu

The Oklahoma State University Department of History will welcome Dr. Erika Hughes, an internationally known theatre director and playwright,  to campus on March 8 to speak about her one-act play, The Amazing Life of Margot Heuman. 
 
Hughes is a director of Holocaust theater and a performance studies scholar who has been widely published about theatre’s role in representing the Holocaust — specifically youth experiences during those years. Her talk at OSU will focus on “Staging History: Performance, Holocaust Testimony, and an Amazing Lesbian Life,” wherein she will examine the survival and post-Holocaust personal history of Margot Heuman, a Jewish and lesbian survivor of Auschwitz. The talk is part of the Fae Rawdon Norris Foundation for the Humanities’ Speaker Series, which this year focuses on freedom. 
 
“We are thrilled to have Dr. Hughes join us in Stillwater and to share her work with the community,” said  Dr. Holly Karibo, OSU associate professor of history. “Her research is groundbreaking and challenges us to think about the many ways that we can tell compelling histories and reach broad audiences.  

“Her work also reminds us of the importance and power of oral history in recovering experiences from the past. This is especially important as the number of Holocaust survivors gets smaller each year, and as we see a resurgence of antisemitism globally.”  

Hughes’ play — which she co-wrote with Dr. Anna Hájková, a Holocaust historian and lesbian scholar — premiered in 2021 at Brighton’s Fringe Festival in the United Kingdom. It has since been seen around the world at venues that include the Jewish Museum Vienna, the Wiener Holocaust Library in London and the GLBT Historical Society and Museum in San Francisco.  
 
The Amazing Life of Margot Heuman is inspired by and recreates the series of oral history sessions that Hájková conducted with Heuman, who passed away in 2022 at the age of 94. It was during those sessions that Heuman first spoke about herself as a lesbian survivor, making her the first Jewish Holocaust survivor to bear such testimony from that perspective. 
 
“Representing Heuman’s life reflects the value of continuing to uncover, preserve and share widely the experiences of diverse survivors of the Holocaust,” said Lucy Bailey, director of gender, women’s and sexuality studies at OSU. “It honors Heuman’s testimony of her life as a lesbian, including how her queerness gave her hope during the darkest of moments.” 
 
“Staging History: Performance, Holocaust Testimony, and an Amazing Lesbian Life” will take place at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 8, in the Social Sciences and Humanities Building’s first floor Parlor Room. The talk is free and open to the public, with sponsorship coming from the Fae Rawdon Norris Foundation for the Humanities, the OSU Department of History, Program in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and the Friends of the Forms. 
 
For more information, contact Karibo at hkaribo@okstate.edu.