18th Annual Powell-Heller Conference for Holocaust Education:
“More Than Dust: Reclaiming LGBTQ+ Voices of the Holocaust”
November 4-6, 2026
Thanks to the generosity of donors this event is free and open to the public.
Pacific Lutheran University will host the 18th annual Powell Heller Conference from November 4–6, a gathering dedicated to challenging traditional archives to recover the intimate histories of queer and marginalized histories of the Holocaust. This year’s conference, titled “More Than Dust: Reclaiming LGBTQ+ Voices of the Holocaust,” focuses on LGBTQ+ experiences of the Holocaust. We are honored to welcome historian Anna Hájková as our Raphael Lemkin speaker. Her book, People Without History Are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust, serves as the foundation for this year’s programming. As Dr. Hájková argues, “thinking about the marginalized can help us to develop a less judgemental, more inclusive past” – a project we aim to collectively engage in during our time together.
The conference features a special theater performance and a film screening alongside its academic components. Attendees will hear from leading international scholars in the field, including Laurie Marhoefer and Samuel Clowes Huneke, as well as a workshop from educators at The Pink Triangle Project and pedagogy sessions from educators at Yad Vashem. Through theater, film, keynote lectures, and panel discussions, participants will discover new methodologies for confronting historical erasure, ultimately reshaping how we archive, remember, and honor the Holocaust.
PLU’s mission to support the education of our students and larger community on issues of diversity and justice are intimately connected to the study of the tragedy of the Holocaust. Students can see that marginalization of a minority group, such as the Jews of Nazi Germany, can lead to life-threatening situations culminating in one of the world’s modern genocides. Issues of distortion and denial make the process of reconciliation and healing less likely and serve as an insult to the memory of all those whose lives were destroyed in the Holocaust.
Keynote Speakers
Samuel Clowes Huneke
Samuel Clowes Huneke is associate professor of history at George Mason University. A historian of modern Europe, his work focuses on gender and sexuality in twentieth-century Germany. He is the author of States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (2022), A Queer Theory of the State (2023), and I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany (2026).
Dr. Anna Hájková
Dr. Anna Hájková is Reader for modern European continental history at the University of Warwick, where she co-directs the Centre for Global Jewish Studies. Her first book, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, came out in 2020 with Oxford University Press. Her second book People Without History are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust (University of Toronto Press, 2025) was awarded the National Jewish Book Award 2026. She is a pioneer of queer Holocaust history, and her work has been awarded the 2020 Orfeo Iris Prize
Laurie Marhoefer
Laurie Marhoefer is a historian of queer and transgender people in Germany from the turn of the twentieth century through 1945. He has written many essays and two books, Sex and the Weimar Republic, a study of sexual politics and the Weimar Republic, and Racism and the Making of Gay Rights, a double biography of Magnus Hirschfeld and Li Shiu Tong that was shortlisted for the Susanne M. Glasscock Book Prize. He also co-wrote two amicus briefs for United States Supreme Court cases involving transgender rights. He has had visiting positions at the University of Oxford, the University of Toronto, and the University of Michigan, and won fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is currently writing Trans Berlin: The Jazz Age Story of Love, Survival, and the First Transgender Political Movement (forthcoming fall 2027 with Tiny Reparations Books (Penguin Random House US), The Bodley Head (Penguin Random House UK), Grupo Editorial Record (Brazil)). Marhoefer lives in Seattle and at the moment holds the Jon Bridgman Endowed Professorship of history at the University of Washington.
Arts Highlights
Film Screening & Talkback
Followed by a conversation with filmmaker Jeremy Borison.
Theater Performance
The Tales of the Alchemyst Theater performance of “Papillions de Malherbe”
Live Band Performance
The Love Markets
