The Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture (ICSLAC) at Carleton University is delighted to announce that the 2021 ICSLAC talks lecture will be delivered by Dr. Erica Lehrer from Concordia University. Entitled “Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust”, Professor Lehrer’s lecture investigates whether inanimate objects can store and communicate traumatic memory that cannot be directly expressed. Her talk focuses on ‘folk art’ made by non-professional Polish artists – many of them village laborers – documenting the German Nazi occupation of Poland and the Holocaust. Made largely in the 1960s and 70s, these objects are uncanny: at times deeply moving, at others grotesque, they can also be disturbing for the ways they impose Catholic idioms on Jewish suffering, or upend accepted roles of victim, perpetrator, and bystander.