Reflections on trauma and the process of researching and writing the histories and memories of the Holocaust

This paper was delivered at the University of Zaragoza, 'Acts of Remembrance' conference (24-26 April 2013) as part of Dr Allwork and Dr Sonya Andermahr's Santander sponsored trip to promote the Working Group for Interdisciplinary Research in Trauma, Narrative and Performance. Included here is the conference programme as well as reviews of the conference that Dr Allwork and Dr Andermahr posted on the University of Northampton website and research hu

'Sedimented histories' and 'embodied legacies': Creating an evaluative framework for understanding public engagement with the First World War

This article reflects on the development of a new methodological framework for the evaluation of the impact of the Centre for Hidden Histories, one of the Arts and Humanities Research Council's First World War Engagement Centres. It shows how through evaluative processes such as academic and community partner Shared Experience Workshops, and community-focused Reflection Workshops, the historical, social, cultural and economic benefits of the centre can be highlighted. It also demonstrates how public engagement in these community history projects has resulted in the identification of new 'embodied legacies' (Facer and Enright, 2016) and heretofore marginalized 'sedimented histories' (Lloyd and Moore, 2015). These lessons in evaluation can be taken forward to inform future national commemorative moments, such as the centenary of the Second World War.This research has been conducted as part of the AHRC Centre for Hidden Histories. First at the University of Nottingham (June 2016 – September 2018), and then at the University of Derby (September 2018 – present)

The Holocaust, the Jews of Lithuania and Blair's foreign policy

Holocaust Memorial Day Keynote Lecture, Northampton Synagogue, 26 February 2012. Chair: Dr Paul Jackso

Research in the School of the Arts

Presented and discussed my research role within the School of the Arts with court members (Governors of the University, honorary degree holders, honorary fellows, local employers, representatives of livery companies, local politicians and community leaders, leaders of faith groups, county dignitaries)

From Tell Ye Your Children to Dinner with Polpot: the challenges of globalizing Holocaust memories at Sweden’s Living History Forum

Established in 2003 as Europe’s first publically funded national educational authority on the Holocaust, tolerance, democracy and human rights, Sweden’s Living History Forum (LHF) lies at the intersection of global, national and local Holocaust remembrance cultures and their ‘universalisation’ into the wider study of global ‘Crimes against Humanity’. Beginning with LHF’s origins in 1997’s Living History Project, this paper will discuss major developments within the organization over the last ten years. It will address how LHF has effectively worked in the space between the national and the transnational as well as the controversies that LHF has stimulated, particularly as Conny Mithander has noted, in relation to the representation of communist crimes. This paper will also give an overview of an increasingly critical liberal historiography, which sees LHF as part of a progressively more ‘regularized’ Swedish remembrance culture. My paper will include interview material with Paul Levine and Stéphane Bruchfeld, authors of Tell Ye Your Children as well as information from a 2014 meeting with Marcel Rådström (Educator) and Johan Perwe (Press Officer) at LHF’s premises in Stockholm on 14 May 2014. My paper will also connect the case of LHF to some of the broader findings of my forthcoming book, Holocaust Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational: A Case Study of the Stockholm International Forum (2000) and the First Decade of the ITF

Recent approaches to Holocaust memory work: Lithuania and the British at the turn of the millennium

I gave a paper on the British/Lithuanian ITF 'Liaison Project' as part of a panel on 'National and Transnational Narratives of the Holocaust' at the 'Holocaust Memory Re-Visited' conference, Uppsala University, 21-23 March 2013. Included here are the conference programme and a review of the conference that appeared in 'H-Soz-u-Kult', which is based at the Humboldt University, Berli

Memory frictions: negotiating cosmopolitanism and postcolonialism in three post-Cold War essays by Tomas Venclova

Lithuanian poet, literary critic and essayist, Tomas Venclova was a child during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, an inhabitant of Vilnius in the period of high Stalinism and a Soviet dissident intellectual and member of the Lithuanian Helsinki group during the 1970s. Since his emigration from the Soviet Union to the West in 1979, Venclova has become a prominent diasporic thinker on the 'memory frictions' of Cold War and post-Soviet Europe and the Baltic States, particularly how the remembrance of past conflicts affects relations between Lithuanians and Jews, Lithuanians and Poles and Lithuanians and Russians. This paper will analyse four of Venclova’s literary and political essays, in particular his post-1989 works ‘Odo et Amo’ (1990) and ‘Poems Melted into Ice’ (1991) in order to explore Venclova’s response to Soviet colonialism and its aftermaths. Following Stef Craps, this analysis will suggest that through an attentiveness to Venclova’s essays, particularly in relation to language and history, a different aesthetic of bearing witness to trauma can be interpreted. This representational strategy rejects, “the modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia” (Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds, 2012, p. 2) traditionally associated with a post-Caruth trauma theory orientated towards the theoretical and literary traditions of Western Europe and America. Instead, Venclova presents strategies of representation which are much more attuned to the specific post-Soviet cultural, linguistic and political experiences of the Baltic States, a specific set of experiences, which while reflecting on much discussed topics such as the Holocaust and Soviet oppression, remain nonetheless geographically marginalized in contemporary Anglophone trauma studies

Response to Dr Dace Dzenovska for the panel session, ‘Cultural politics and Baltic diasporas’

During this panel session, I gave a response to some of the questions raised by Dr Dace Dzenovska's paper, 'The Great Departure: Debt and Morality in the context of Latvian Outmigration', within the wider context of the Baltic States. Given my interests in collective memory, I explored how the dynamics of this 'Great Migration' might impact on how the Second World War, the Holocaust and the Soviet-era is remembered by Lithuanians and Lithuanian Jews both within Lithuania and receiving countries such as the UK. Attached are the poster and conference programme for this event which was was covened by Professor Janet Wilson and myself and was supported by the EU Marie Curie CoHaB ITN

Shared Experience Workshop and the Impact of the Centre for Hidden Histories Research Projects

On 19th September 2016, academic and community participants in research projects funded by the Centre for Hidden Histories convened for a ‘Shared Experience Workshop’ at Derby Riverside Centre. The day was organised by Impact Fellow, Dr Larissa Allwork, Community Liaison Officer, Mike Noble and Principle Investigator on the Centre for Hidden Histories project, Professor John Beckett. Participants presented their findings and discussed their experiences of working as part of an AHRC Connected Communities First World War Engagement Centre. The specific focus of the day was the ‘impact’ of their projects or what the AHRC defines as, “…the ‘influence’ of research or its ‘effect on’ an individual, a community, the development of policy, or the creation of a new product or service. It relates to the effects of research on our economic, social and cultural lives.” Academic participants included Professor Jane Chapman (University of Lincoln), Professor Kurt Barling (Middlesex University), Professor Panikos Paniyi (Leicester DeMontfort University), Dr Tim Grady (University of Chester), Professor Paul Elliott (University of Derby) and Dr David Amos. Community group leaders represented included Judith Garfield MBE (Eastside Community Heritage), Alison Jones (Knockaloe & Patrick Visitor Centre), Anne Marie Curtis (St. Werburgh’s Great War Study Group) and David Stowe (‘In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time’ project). This project report considers some of the key impacts of the Centre for Hidden Histories academic/university partnerships

‘Interrogating Europe’s Voids: Holocaust Trauma between the National and the Transnational

Reflecting on the research process for Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the Transnational (HRNT), which explores and analyzes the significance of the European and global politics of the commemoration of the Holocaust and Nazi-era crimes in the late 1990s and 2000s, this article will consider the influence of the intellectual context of trauma theory for this book. It will offer a response to the increasing critique of Eurocentric trauma theory which developed during the period spent researching the Stockholm International Forum (SIF 2000) and the first decade of the Task Force for International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF, now the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA). This article will discuss how a revised trauma theory, along the lines suggested by scholars such as Joshua Pederson, continues to offer important possibilities for European studies of the histories and memories of the Holocaust in singular and comparative terms