Dr Isabel Wollaston, BA, PhD
Associate Professor in Jewish and Holocaust Studies at the University of Birmingham
Isabel Wollaston is Associate Professor in Jewish and Holocaust Studies at the University of Birmingham. She is an expert on the history, representation and memorialization of the Holocaust, with particular reference to Auschwitz. In 2015 Isabel served as President of the British & Irish Association for Holocaust Studies (BAIHS). She is currently a member of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation Academic Advisory Board for the planned new national memorial and learning centre in London. In November 2017 she was part of a panel representing BIAHS at a European Association for Jewish Studies conference in Krakow marking the 70th anniversary of the creation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Her contribution was published as '(Re-)visualizing the “heart of hell'? Representations of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando in the art of David Olère and Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015)', Holocaust Studies 27:1 (2021). Further publications include A War against Memory? The Future of Holocaust Remembrance (1996); ‘‘Negotiating the marketplace: The role(s) of Holocaust museums today’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 4:1 (2005); ‘The absent, the partial and the iconic in archival photographs of the Holocaust’ in Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling (eds), Visualizing Jews through the Ages (2015); (with Dominic Williams) , ‘The Sonderkommando and the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum’ in Nicholas Chare & Dominic Williams (eds), Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando (2019); and “I belong here. I know I ought never to have come back, because it has proved I've never been away”: Kitty Hart-Moxon's documentaries of return’ in Tom Lawson & Andy Pearce (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust (2020).
