Workshop: Lost worlds of East European Jewry: images and narratives

23 January 2014
PhD workshop with Michael Berkowitz (UCL) and Delphine Bechtel (Paris IV Sorbonne) Part of the 2013-14 series In Place(s) of Memory.

Associated with the joint lecture Lost worlds of East European Jewry: images and narratives, we host a PhD workshop with students and staff from UCL and the Sorbonne. It is directed at PhD students with research broadly in the area of historiography, autobiography and fictional representation of the past; contemporary memory politics and memory tourism; and competing memory and identity narratives; particularly in Central and Eastern Europe.

Michael Berkowitz is Professor of Modern Jewish History at University College London.  His most recent publication is "Morality Plays:  Presentations of Criminality and Disease in Nazi Ghettos and Concentration Camps and Beyond" in Disease and Crime:  A History of Social Pathologies and the New Politics of Health, ed. Robert Peckham (Routledge, 2013).  His research on Jews and photography was featured at the 32.Bielefelder Fotosymposium (November 2013) and has been supported by the Harry Ransom Center of the University of Texas, the Getty Institute (Los Angeles), and the British Society for the History of Science.

Delphine Bechtel is Professor for German, Yiddish, and Central European Studies at the Université Paris IV Sorbonne and co-director of CIRCE, the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Central Europe. Her current work is on Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian competing memories in Poland and Ukraine, on the musealization of the past, and on memory tourism.

IF-UCL collaboration: 'In Place(s) of Memory'
UCL and the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni have recently signed an agreement to collaborate on a series of workshops over a period of three years, focusing on research in the Humanities, to build on existing and explore new links between UCL and French academic and research organisations. The UCL European Institute is organising the first year of activity under this new scheme. Entitled 'In Place(s) of Memory', the season has an interdisciplinary focus and, particularly appropriate given the centenary of the beginning of World War I in 2014, aims to offer an intellectual platform for established scholars, early career academics, and the wider public on history, memory, and commemoration.