Projects

The team is currently working on several research projects.

Learn more about some of the projects we are currently engaged with by using the drop-down tabs:

  • Paying for the Past: Reparations after the Holocaust in a Global Context

    Professor Gideon Reuveni together with Dr Iris Nachum (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Professor Daniel Siemens (Newcastle University), has been selected to lead a research group at the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. The group will focus on the topic of reparations for historical injustice.

    Victims of past injustices and their descendants often seek both material and symbolic compensation, as well as a say in how present-day societies frame and narrate these events. Redressing historical wrongs is a vital form of social justice and has become increasingly important on political and historical agendas.

    This research group aims to bring together scholars from various disciplines to stimulate discussion and establish a new framework on this topic. In doing so, the group aims to make a significant contribution to the discourse on reparations and reconciliation in the 20th and 21st centuries.

    For further information, please contact G.Reuveni@sussex.ac.uk

  • Digital Holocaust Memory Project

    The Digital Holocaust Memory Project is led by Dr Victoria Grace Walden and has three aims:     

    1. To map the digital Holocaust memoryscape, including institutional and amateur projects    
    2. To interrogate the ‘newness’ of digital Holocaust memory and understand it in relation to media, museum and memory histories as well as within contemporary digital logics and cultures    
    3. To establish a network of heritage and archive professionals, academics, amateur and professional media producers, and digital audiences/users to explore potential digital futures for Holocaust memory together.

    Recommendations

    During 2022, the project worked with more than 80 individuals from Holocaust organisations, the tech and creative industries, and academics from diverse disciplines to co-create recommendations for digital interventions in Holocaust memory and education.

    The first recommendations reports, prepared by Dr Victoria Grace Walden and Dr Kate Marrison, have been published on four urgent digital themes:     

    • AI and Machine Learning    
    • Digitising Material Evidence    
    • Social Media    
    • Recording, Recirculating and Remixing Testimony 

    The project is especially grateful to the number of project partners they worked with to co-host these workshops: The University of Bern; iRights.Lab, Germany; The Centre of Life Writing and Life History, University of Sussex; The Hebrew University; Future Memory Foundation; and the Historical Games Network.

    This project was generously supported by funding from the Economic and Social Research Council’s Impact Acceleration Account and the School of Media, Arts and Humanities, and the in-kind support of all of the project partners (the support from the University of Bern was enabled by generous funding from the Alfred Landecker Foundation).

    For more information or to contribute to the Digital Holocaust Memory Project, please contact V.Walden@sussex.ac.uk

  • Digital Holocaust Education Project

    The Sussex Digital Holocaust Education Project seeks to create a digital resource to enable students to actively explore the question: What did Britain know about the Holocaust as it was unfolding?

    This project follows on from a research report produced by the Centre for German-Jewish Studies in 2015 which assessed teaching approaches to the Holocaust, educational materials, and student responses in classrooms within secondary schools across the counties of Sussex and Hampshire.

    In response to this report, Dr Kate Marrison is leading a research group working with materials within the Mass Observation Archives (held within The Keep, University of Sussex) to map out the traces, absences and connections which point to nuanced understandings about what individuals knew before, during and after the Holocaust.

    As the project enters its next phase, a series of pilot study sessions with educators will enable students to explore personal writings (including diaries, day surveys and directive replies) collected by MO, to frame the experience of learning about the Holocaust through micro-events at a local level.

    For further information, please contact K.Marrison@sussex.ac.uk