For many years, Alan Tansman has taught courses on cultural responses to atrocity in the Jewish and Japanese experience, but reaching beyond those cases to examples from Africa, the United States, Indonesia, and Europe. He has published on the pedagogy of teaching atrocity comparatively and on the Japanese photography of atrocity. He is now writing a book that treats the aesthetics and form of cultural work (in the above cases) that struggles for a non-figurative response to violence.