Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth

Zsuzsanna Ozsváth is founder and director of the Holocaust Studies Program. She has published a number of articles, dealing with aesthetic and ethical issues in French, German, and Hungarian literature as well as with the relationship between art and totalitarian ideology. Since the 1980’s, she has undertaken several translation projects and worked on various branches of Holocaust studies.

“The Holocaust Studies Program, with its combination of scholarly research, education at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and its distinguished lecture series, is one of the distinguishing hallmarks of UT Dallas. The program’s success is a result of Dr. Ozsváth’s passionate dedication and charismatic leadership,” Provost Hobson Wildenthal said when she was named to the Leah and Paul Lewis Chair of Holocaust Studies in 2003.

In the field of translation, she started out with rendering and publishing a significant number of German and Hungarian poems and short stories in journals, but the culmination of her work in this field has been three volumes of poetry, each with UT Dallas professor Frederick Turner. Ozsváth has also published books and several articles on writers and poets of the Holocaust.

In 2009, she was named to The Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission, a newly formed state commission by Gov. Rick Perry. The commission is intended to provide educational materials to schools and colleges and help implement course studies and awareness programs of the Holocaust and other genocides.

In 2010, Ozsváth published her chilling memoir, When the Danube Ran Red, which tells the story of her childhood in Hungary, living under the threat of the Holocaust. The book has received reviews in a variety of journals such as The Sewanee Review, The English Review and Hungarian Literature Online.

Dr. Polykarp Kusch

Dr. Polykarp Kusch was Nobel laureate in physics in 1955 and came to The University of Texas at Dallas in 1972.

At UT Dallas, he was Regental Professor and served on the physics faculty. His distinguished science career was complemented by his superb teaching. He delighted students with his presentations of physics experiments in his “Phenomena of Nature” classes.

Before coming to UT Dallas, Dr. Kusch had served as professor, vice president, provost and dean of faculties at Columbia University.

When he retired in 1982, UT Dallas established a program of annual lectures with the theme “Concerns of the Lively Mind” to honor Dr. Kusch.

Kusch Lectures