UKHMF Academic Advisory Board

The UKHMF Academic Advisory Board provides peer-review and a discussion forum for the Co-Chairs and professional team regarding the envisioned content of the UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre.

The UKHMF (UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation) Academic Advisory Board provides peer-review and a discussion forum for the Co-Chairs and professional team regarding the envisioned content of the UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre.

The Board comprises a wide range of academic expertise and practical experience of curating Holocaust-related museums, exhibitions and events. It strives to ensure that the content of the Memorial and Learning Centre rests on secure scholarly, intellectual and pedagogical foundations, reflecting Britain’s responses to the Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews in an open, nuanced and multifaceted way. The Board is also determined that the UK Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre will encourage visitors of all ages and backgrounds to ask searching questions about other historical crimes and how we as a society respond to them.

Chair

Ben Barkow

Ben Barkow worked at the Wiener Holocaust Library from 1987 to 2019, where he served as its Director for 20 years. He is the author of Alfred Wiener and the Making of the Holocaust Library (1997), co-editor of Als obs ein Leben wär: Tatsachenbericht Theresienstadt 1942-1944 (2005), and co-editor of November Pogrom 1938: Die Augenzeugenberichte der Wiener Library London (2008). He currently serves as Chair of both the Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association and the Toni Schiff Memorial Fund. He is also a Trustee of the Ernest Hecht Foundation and a Member of the Academic Advisory Board for the new Second World War and the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum.

Academics with relevant specialist expertise

Dr Gilly Carr

Gilly Carr is a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. Also publishing in the fields of History, Heritage Studies and Holocaust Studies, Gilly is the principal historian of the German occupation of the Channel Islands. Her publications include Victims of Nazism in the Channel Islands: A Legitimate Heritage? (2019), Legacies of Occupation: Archaeology, Heritage and Memory in the Channel Islands (2014), and, with Paul Sanders and Louise Willmot, Protest, Defiance and Resistance in the Channel Islands, 1940-1945 (2014). She is also a member of the UK delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). In 2020, she was awarded the European Association of Archaeologists’ Heritage Medal for her activism in the heritage sphere on behalf of the Channel Islands’ victims of Nazism.

Professor Robert Eaglestone

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, and former Deputy Director of the Holocaust Research Institute, at Royal Holloway, University of London. Robert is a UK leading scholar of Holocaust-related literature and philosophy. His publications include The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature (2017) and The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004).

Professor Stuart Foster

Stuart Foster is the Executive Director of UCL’s Centre for Holocaust Education and has provided strategic leadership for the programme since its inception in 2008. Adopting a research-informed approach, more than 25,000 teachers have participated in the Centre’s programmes. He was lead author on the Centre’s ground-breaking study, What do students know and understand about the Holocaust? (2016) which was based on the views and perspectives of more than 10,000 school students. He has recently published the world’s first research-informed school textbook on the Holocaust, Understanding the Holocaust: How and why did it happen? (2020) and co-edited, Holocaust Education: Contemporary challenges and controversies (2020).

Professor Mary Fulbrook

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at UCL. Having focused much of her academic career on wider modern Germany history, the history of the GDR especially, she has also authored a number of works that address the history of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, including A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012) and her 2019 Wolfson History Prize winning monograph, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (2018). Mary is currently directing an AHRC-funded project on ‘Compromised Identities? Reflections on perpetration and complicity under Nazism’ and is a member of the Academic Advisory Board (wissenschaftliches Kuratorium) of the Memorial Foundation for the former concentration camps of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora.

Emeritus Professor Philip Spencer

Philip Spencer is an Emeritus Professor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Kingston University where he founded the Helen Bamber Centre for the Study of Rights, Conflict and Mass Violence. He is a Visiting Professor in Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and is also a Research Associate of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism. A Trustee of the Wiener Holocaust Library, he is the author of several monographs, including Nations and Nationalism (2006), with Howard Wollman; Genocide since 1945 (2012); and Anti-Semitism and the Left: On the return of the Jewish Question (2017), with Robert Fine.

Professor Nikolaus Wachsmann

Nikolaus Wachsmann is Professor of Modern European History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and the author of KL. A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, winner of the 2016 Wolfson History Prize and the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize. He is currently writing a new history of Auschwitz. Nikolaus has served on the International Advisory Board Bergen-Belsen, and serves on Academic Advisory Boards at the Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Mauthausen Memorials. He is a member of the International Advisory Board of the 15-volume documentary edition The Persecution and Murder of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, and has developed an educational website, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, about the history of the Nazi camps (www.camps.bbk.ac.uk).

Dr Zoë Waxman

Zoë Waxman is a Lecturer in Modern Jewish History at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. With research interests in Holocaust testimony, memory, and gender, she is the author of Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (2008), Anne Frank (2015), and Women in the Holocaust: A Feminist History of the Holocaust (2017). Zoë is a Board Member of the British Association of Holocaust Studies and also sits on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. She is a Trustee of the Wiener Holocaust Library and a Member of the Academic Advisory Board for the new Second World War and the Holocaust Galleries at the Imperial War Museum.

Dr Isabel Wollaston

Isabel Wollaston is a Senior Lecturer in Jewish and Holocaust Studies at the University of Birmingham. A theologian by training, she is an expert on the history, representation, and memorialisation of the Holocaust, with particular reference to Auschwitz and the work of Elie Wiesel. Isabel was a member of the Home Office’s Holocaust Memorial Day Strategic Vision Group (2002-2005) and has served on the Academic Advisory Board of the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Laxton, Nottinghamshire. She is the author of A War against Memory? The Future of Holocaust Remembrance (1996) and has previously served as President of both the British Association for Jewish Studies (2005) and the British Association for Holocaust Studies (2015).

Paul Shapiro

Paul Shapiro served from 1997 to 2016 as Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and currently serves as the Museum’s first Director of International Affairs. A former editor of the journal Problems of Communism (Washington) and editor-in-chief of the Journal of International Affairs (New York), Paul was also a consultant to the Board for International Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, and the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI). He was a member of the Congressionally-mandated Interagency Working Group on Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records; served on the Academic Advisory Committee of the Center for Jewish History (New York); and wrote major sections of the Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel. Paul played a key role in opening the International Tracing Service archive in Bad Arolsen, Germany, and making its contents available to Holocaust survivors and scholars worldwide. He is the author of The Kishinev Ghetto 1941-1942: A Documentary History of the Holocaust in Romania’s Contested Borderlands (2015), and is the recipient of both the Cross of the Order of Merit (Verdienstkreuz) of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Order of Merit-Commander Class of the Republic of Romania.