Trauma and Healing in Contemporary Native American, African American and Jewish Literature

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Panni Szűcs’s research focuses on literature of three groups: Native American, African American and Jewish. She examines representative literary works from well-known authors of the three ethnic groups as well as scholarly texts concentrating on trauma and memory studies. She pays close attention to the trauma these groups endured, their struggles in the 21^st century’s context, the approaches they use in order to heal; and how these actions are translated in their literature. The research also explores forgetting and remembering and how the two are connected with trauma and healing. Trauma studies tend to focus on the trauma that individuals of a specific group experienced and also on a so called interconnectedness between the members of the group based on their mutual experience, culture, past, present and future. In this research Szűcs aims to argue that interconnectedness is not only probable within a group or a race exclusively, but between different groups and races, and what connects them is the similar trauma they have experienced.

Panni Szűcs is a Ph.D student at the Foreign Languages and Literature Department of National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan. She received her Master double degree in Communication and Hungarian Literature at the University of Szeged in her home country, Hungary. After graduating, she won the Taiwanese Huayu Enrichment Scholarship to learn Chinese in Taiwan and later to obtain another Bachelor degree in English at the National University of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Her field is Native American Literature and Minority Studies. While working on her dissertation, Szűcs is currently a part-time lecturer in two prominent Taiwanese universities.