Staff and Research Interests

Research interests

In responding to the Holocaust we research in a range of disciplines, including history, literary studies, theory film and media studies and philosophy, and welcome graduates in any of these areas.  We especially welcome students with interdisciplinary projects.

The research of the members of the Centre has been supported by grants from Leverhulme, the AHRC, the British Academy, DAAD, Humboldt, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and elsewhere.

Professor Andrew Bowie

(German Department) has published widely in the areas of modern German philosophy, literature, and music. He is at present working on an Introduction to German Philosophy from Kant to Habermas and on a book on Music, Meaning and Modernity, as well as on other aspects of German philosophy and literature. He has been a Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow at the University of Tübingen, and is a member of the Philosophy Benchmarking Panel for the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education.

Professor David Cesarani

(History Department, on leave 2008-09) is Research Professor in History. His research interests fall broadly within the field of modern Jewish history and culture, with the accent on the relations between Jews and non-Jews and the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews, in particular. His interests extend to many allied subjects including ethnicity and ‘race’, immigration and citizenship, and genocide. His publications include: ed. The Making of Modern Anglo-Jewry (1990); Justice Delayed. How Britain became a refuge for Nazi war criminals  (1992); ed. with T. Kushner, The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain (1993); The 'Jewish Chronicle' and Anglo-Jewry 1841-1991 (1994); ed. The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (1994); ed. with M. Fulbrook, Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe (1996); ed. Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary, 1944 (1997); Arthur Koestler. The Homeless Mind (1998); ed. Port Jews. Jewish communities in cosmopolitan maritime trading centres, 1650-1950 (2002); Eichmann. His Life and Crimes (2004); The Jews and the Left/ The Left and the Jews (2004). David Cesarani was a member of the British delegation to the International Task Force for Intergovernmental Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research and advised the Home Office about Holocaust Memorial Day. He served on the advisory board of the Imperial War Museum’s permanent Holocaust exhibition and has made a number of radio documentaries for the BBC and acted as consultant for several TV documentaries including The Irving Trial (C4, 2000); I Met Adolf Eichmann (BBC2, 2001); Auschwitz: the Forgotten Evidence (C4, 2004); Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution (BBC2, 2005).

Professor Colin Davis

(French Department, French Holocaust literature) http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Modern-Languages/staff/davis.html

Máire Davies

Is the Executive-Director of Centre.  She served for five years as Head of Royal Holloway’s German Department (1996-2001) and has recently completed five years as Dean of the Faculty of Arts. 

Professor Robert Eaglestone

(English Department) is the Director of the Centre and Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought. He is the author of four books, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (1997), Doing English (1999, 2nd ed 2002), Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (2001), The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004) and the editor or co-editor of four books Reading the Lord of the Rings (2006), Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (2008), Derrida’s Legacies (2008),  and J. M. Coetzee in Theory and Practice (forthcoming). He has published articles on Salman Rushdie, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Imre Kertész, Angela Carter, the Holocaust, terrorism, contemporary British fiction, and a range of issues in philosophy, literary theory and historiography. His work has been translated into five languages. He has received research awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.  He advises the UK government’s Qualifications and Curriculum Authority. He is the Series Editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers, which has 35 volumes and has sold over 120,000 copies world-wide.   He has written for the TLS, The Independent, The Guardian and the Jewish Chronicle as well as the academic press and is on the Executive committee of the Forum for European Philosophy.

Dr Barry Langford

(Media Arts Department) specialises in the place of the Holocaust in contemporary visual culture, with particular emphasis on cinematic and televisual representations. Recent publications include studies of Holocaust film as genre, a discussion of the “unrepresentability” of mass death and an analysis of the unacknowledged shadow of the Holocaust in the film writings of Siegfried Kracauer. His other research interests include critical theory; American and European cinema; theories of mass culture; postmodernism. He is the author of Film Genre: Hollywood and Beyond (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming) and is currently preparing a major study of Holocaust film. Dr Langford’s short film, Torte Blume, was the recipient of several awards, and he is currently working on a second, longer, Holocaust-related film.

Professor Peter Longerich

(German Department, on leave 2008-2009) specialises in the history of the Weimar Republic, Third Reich, Second World War and the Holocaust. Major publications include: Heinrich Himmler: Biographie (Siedler, 2008); „Davon haben wir nichts gewuust“: Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung (Sielder, 2006); Der Ungeschriebene Befehl. Hitler und der Weg zur "Endlösung" (Munich: Piper, 2001) – translated as The Unwritten Order. Hitler's Role in the Final Solution (Stroud/Charleston SC: Tempus, 2001); Politik der Vernichtung. Eine Gesamt­darstellung der national­sozial­istischen Judenverfolgung (Munich: Piper 1998); Deutschland 1918-1933. Die Weimarer Republik Handbuch zur Geschichte (Hannover: Fackelträger, 1995); Stichwort 30. Januar 1933 (Munich: Heyne, 1992); Hitlers Stellvertreter. Führung der NSDAP und Kontrolle des Staatsapparates durch den Stab Heß und Bormanns Partei-Kanzlei (Munich: Saur, 1992); Die braunen Bataillone. Geschichte der SA (Munich: C.H. Beck 1989). Professor Longerich was one of four expert witnesses for the defence in the libel case brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books.

Professor Dan Stone

(History Department) works on historiographical and philosophical interpretations of the Holocaust, comparative genocide, history of anthropology, and the cultural history of the British Right. Publications include Theoretical Interpretations of the Holocaust (ed., Rodopi, 2001); Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool  University Press, 2002); Constructing the Holocaust: A Study in Historiography (Vallentine Mitchell, 2003); Responses to Nazism in Britain 1933-1939: Before War and Holocaust (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); The Historiography of the Holocaust (ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); History, Memory and Mass Atrocity: Essays on the Holocaust and Genocide (Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), Colonialism and Genocide (ed. with A. Dirk Moses, Routledge, 2007); Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide (ed. with Richard H. King, Berghahn Books, 2007); and The Historiography of Genocide (ed., Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) as well as articles in the Journal of Modern History, Journal of Contemporary History, European History Quarterly, Jewish Social Studies, Journal of Genocide Research, European Journal of Social Theory, Patterns of Prejudice, German History, History and Anthropology and others. Dan Stone is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Genocide Research and Patterns of Prejudice. He is currently writing a book on Holocaust historiography for OUP, and editing two books: The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History (OUP) and The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (Berghahn Books).

Dr Rudolf Muhs

(History Department, 19th and 20th-century German history; history of Berlin; minorities in interwar Europe) lectures in twentieth-century European history. He has published widely on the novelist Theodor Fontane, on the cultural transfer of ideas, and on German émigrés in Britain. He is currently working on a project on German identities in the twentieth century, and a study entitled The Brown Shirts in Britain.

Dr Zoe Waxman

is an RCUK early career Research Fellow in the Department of History. Her main interests are Holocaust testimony and representation, and gender. She is the author of Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation (2006), and Gendering the Holocaust (forthcoming, 2007), as well as several articles on testimony written both during and after the Holocaust, and women's Holocaust experiences. She is also the convener for the Centre's Holocaust workshops at the Imperial War Museum.

Research Centre Advisory Board

The Advisory Board of the Research Centre currently includes:

1. Professor Jeremy Noakes (Exeter)
2. Dr Nick Stargardt (Oxford)
3. Professor Andreas Gestrich (Director of the German Historical Institute, London)
4. Suzanne Bardgett (Director of Holocaust Exhibition, Imperial War Museum)
5. Ben Barkow (Director, Wiener Library)
6. Katherine Klinger (Wiener Library)