Henry Greenspan

Henry Greenspan, Ph.D., is an Emeritus Lecturer IV in the Residential College affiliated with the Social Theory and Practice program. Greenspan is a psychologist, oral historian, and playwright at the University of Michigan who has been interviewing, teaching, and writing about Holocaust survivors since the 1970s.  Rather than one-time “testimonies,” Greenspan’s approach has been to meet with survivors in sustained conversation: over months, years, and, in a few cases, decades.  His multiple-interview approach is described in On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Beyond Testimony, now in its second and expanded edition, and Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated, co-authored with Agi Rubin, a survivor with whom Greenspan had collaborated since 1980.  He is the author of numerous articles on survivors’ retelling, including the chapter on survivors’ accounts for the Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies.  In 2011, he co-led the annual Hess Seminar for Professors of Holocaust Courses at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.  In 2012, he was the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University in Montreal.  His award-winning play, REMNANTS, was originally produced for radio at WUOM-FM in 1991.  Greenspan has since presented it as a one-person stage performance at more than 300 venues worldwide.