In the late twentieth century, trauma theory emerged as a dominant paradigm in the humanities, shaped by the recognition of post-traumatic stress disorder and the consolidation of Holocaust memory. Influentially theorised by Cathy Caruth, trauma came to be understood as a belated, repetitive, and embodied experience that resists conventional narrative representation. Recent interventions have challenged the Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism of this paradigm, calling for approaches attentive to entangled forms of suffering across cultures and species. Responding to these debates, this transdisciplinary project examines representations of cross-species traumatic affiliation in Holocaust literature written across several languages. It focuses on how literary texts figure trauma as a phenomenon traversing human and non-human bodies and natural environments. Rather than instrumentalising the Nazi Judeocide as a metaphor for contemporary crises, the project analyses how narratives formally and thematically articulate shared bodily vulnerability, injury, and belated symptomatology during and after the genocide. Drawing on trauma theory, eco- and zoo-criticism, and eco- and zoo-narratology, the study investigates the reparative potential of such representations. It argues that, although Holocaust trauma remains irreparable, literary figurations of embodied cross-species suffering can foster ethical recognition, relational responsibility, and imaginative reparation in response to ongoing human and environmental harms.
HELENA DUFFY
CURRICULUM VITAE
Helena Duffy (MSt Oxon, PhD Oxford Brookes) is a professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Wrocław, Poland. Her research focuses on cultural representations of the Holocaust, which she has recently examined through eco-critical and zoo-critical perspectives. She is the author of two monographs – World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction (Brill, 2018) and The Holocaust in French Postmodern Fiction (Legenda, 2022) – and the co-editor of three edited volumes: Trauma, Ethics, Hermeneutics (Legenda, 2024), Storying the Ecocatastrophe (Routledge, 2024), and The Holocaust and Ecocide in Culture and Public Debate (Routledge, forthcoming 2026). She has edited or co-edited six special issues of academic journals (e.g., French Forum, Holocaust Studies, Journal of Holocaust Research) and has published over fifty journal articles and book chapters. Since 2024, she has been a member of Academia Europaea.