Jason De Leon
The 2019 Holocaust Memorial Lecture featured a presentation by Jason De León, professor of anthropology at UCLA, entitled ‘Understanding the Current Politics of Migrant Life andDeath along the U.S.-Mexico Border.’ De León uses ethnographic analysis, forensic science and archaeological research to study the lives and deaths of migrants in the Sonoran Desert.
The Holocaust Memorial Lecture is an annual event that is administered by the Washington University Center for the Humanities. It was inaugurated in 1989 by then-Chancellor William H. Danforth, who, at the request of both students and faculty, appointed a committee to establish a permanent lecture. Held on or near the anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogroms in Nazi Germany, the lecture aims not only to commemorate the Holocaust but also to address its broader implications for other instances of systematic persecution, mass murder and genocide.