SOUNDING THE SPACES OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE REMAPPING THE CINEMA OF THE HOLOCAUST

About the Speakers (in alphabetical order)

Maurizio Cinquegrani is a Senior Lecturer in Film at the University of Kent. He is the author of three monographs, including Journey to Poland: Documentary Landscapes of the Holocaust (EUP, 2018). He has published articles and book chapters on film, space and memory of the Holocaust, and his work has been translated into Spanish and Russian.

Adam Ganz is Professor in the Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, and active as professional screenwriter and director for radio film and television. His principal research interests focus on audiovisual narrative, with reference to the migration of audiovisual production processes to the digital, and on the TV development process and other forms of collaborative narrative including the collaboration between author and audience.

Simone Gigliotti is Reader in Holocaust Studies in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London (see "About the Conveners").

John Hodges is a current student in the MA Holocaust Studies course at Royal Holloway. His previous career was as an academic neurologist, which included prestigious chairs in Cambridge and Sydney. John a lifelong interest in modern history, notably the Holocaust, so the MA has been a great opportunity for dedicated study in a very different discipline. Of relevance, he is also a massive movie buff.

David Kann is an architect by profession. Since retiring, he has acted as a consultant to the Royal Institute of British Architects, Architects Registration Board, and others. A concurrent complete change of direction came about when he undertook a Masters by Research degree at Royal Holloway University of London. This venture arose from a lifelong desire to study history at an advanced level, a Dutch/German Jewish refugee family background and having time and resources available to pursue these studies for pleasure in later life.

William Pimlott is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Advanced Eastern European Jewish Studies in the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He recently completed his PhD on the Yiddish press in Britain, 1896-1910, at UCL, and has subsequently held a research fellowship at Birkbeck College, University of London, where he studied the Global Yiddish press. His research explores the encounter of modern Yiddish politics and culture with Britain and the British Empire. He is currently working on a new project: the history of YIVO, the main archive and scholarly institute of East European Jewish culture, as told through its global "Friends of YIVO" societies. This project investigates transnational Jewish diasporic history-making before, during and after the Holocaust, a practice that is understood both as intellectual endeavour and social community practice.

Libby Saxton in Reader in Film at Queen Mary University of London. Her publications include Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (Wallflower, 2008), No Power Without an Image: Icons Between Photography and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and the co-authored Film and Ethics: Foreclosed Encounters (Routledge, 2010).

Max Silverman is Professor of Modern French Studies at the University of Leeds. He works on post-Holocaust and postcolonial theory and culture and questions of violence and memory. His recent work questions traumatic memory studies in relation to contemporary Lebanese film.

Sietske van der Veen is a historian and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. In her current research project, she focuses on Jewish and non-Jewish perceptions and conservation of (present and former) Jewish sites and quarters in European cities after 1945, using Amsterdam as a case study.

Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, working in the areas of contemporary literature, film and Holocaust studies. Her latest book is Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’ Outtakes: Holocaust Rescue and Resistance (2021) and she is writing a study of Holocaust representation in popular British and Irish fiction.

Irene Wise was Senior Lecturer in Media and Culture at the University of Roehampton, becoming an Honorary Fellow in the School of Arts in 2021. At Roehampton in 2001, Irene first established an interdisciplinary course in Representations of the Holocaust. Irene regularly lectured at the British Library and has written for their website on a number of cultural subjects. Irene is a Fellow in Holocaust Education at the Imperial War Museum, London, where she lectured on Holocaust Art. She works with key organisations involved in Holocaust education, including The Wiener Holocaust Library. For Penguin Books, Irene wrote and curated an app for iPad on Anne Frank’s The Diary of A Young Girl.

Archie Wolfman is currently working on a PhD in Film Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. His research focuses on how Holocaust memory is represented in contemporary transnational cinemas. He examines a variety of films in different (trans)national contexts to show how the Holocaust today is understood in both dialogue and competition with other genocides and historical events, ranging from the Armenian genocide, the Roma genocide, as well as the ongoing Russian-Ukrainian war. A book chapter about the online viral phenomenon of the "dybbuk box" will be published in an edited volume by De Gruyter on digital Holocaust memory.

About the Conveners

Simone Gigliotti is Reader in Holocaust Studies in the Department of History and Deputy Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author and/or co-editor of seven books including the interactive, digital and open access project, Restless Archive: The Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced (Indiana University Press/Manifold, 2023), and articles on the representation of the Holocaust's transit experiences. Forthcoming publications include “Zakhor AI: Memory re-generations in a disaggregating world” for AJS Perspectives (Summer 2024), and a special issue on “Conflict Transport” for The Journal of Transport History (August 2024).

James S. Williams is Professor of Modern French Literature and Film at Royal Holloway, University of London. His publications include Space and Being in Contemporary French Cinema (2013), Encounters with Godard: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (2016), Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary African Cinema: The Politics of Beauty (2019), Frantz Fanon (2023), and Xala (2024) for the BFI Film Classics series.

Our Supporters

The symposium's conveners are very grateful to the following individuals and institutions for their financial and administrative support: Rossella Di Pietro, Jacqueline Wang and Satoko Sekiguchi (Modern Films); and Bianca Stigter. We are also very grateful to a number of staff members at Royal Holloway, University of London: Richard Alston (Director, Humanities & Arts Research Institute), Dan Stone (Director, Holocaust Research Institute), Ruth Hemus (Head, Languages, Literatures and Cultures) and Jon Hughes (LLC), Julie Fitzpatrick (HRI Administrator and PhD student), Gareth Hughes (CVC Administrator and PhD student), and Ellie Lofthouse (School of Humanities Office).