Dr Isabel Wollaston BA, PhD (Dunelm)

Department of Theology and Religion
Senior Lecturer in Jewish and Holocaust Studies

Contact details

Telephone: +44 (0)121 41 45662
Email: i.l.wollaston@bham.ac.uk

Address: ERI Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

My main teaching and research interests, and the majority of my publications, relate to Holocaust studies and contemporary Jewish-Christian relations (post 1945).

Qualifications

BA
PhD (Dunelm)

Biography

Isabel’s first academic appointment was as Sir James Knott Fellow in the Department of Religious Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. She then received a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, spending a year at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies before moving to the University of Birmingham.

In 2005 Isabel served as President of the British Association for Jewish Studies. In 2015 she was President of the British Association for Holocaust Studies.

Isabel was a member of the Home Office’s Holocaust Memorial Day Strategic Vision Group (2002-2005) and has served on the Academic Advisory Board of the National Holocaust Centre and Museum. Laxton, Nottinghamshire. She was Editor of Reviews in Religion and Theology, 1997-2005.

Isabel is a member of the British Association for Jewish Studies, the British Association for Holocaust Studies, the European Association for Holocaust Studies

Teaching

Undergraduate

Widening Horizons Module: Constructing the Holocaust
Introduction to the Study of the Holocaust
Auschwitz in History and Memory
Jewish Religious Responses to the Holocaust

Postgraduate

Dissertation Preparation and Guided Reading (Holocaust and Genocide)
Research Skills in the Study of Holocaust and Genocide
Historical and contemporary debates on the Holocaust
Holocaust and Genocide: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Jewish Religious Responses to the Holocaust

Postgraduate supervision

Elie Wiesel and Jewish religious responses to the Holocaust;
Contemporary Christian-Jewish relations (with a particular interest in the Christianization of the Holocaust, Catholic-Jewish relations, Christian BDS movements and Kairos Palestine);
Representations of the Holocaust (particularly museums, memorials, photographs, film, testimony, gendered responses);
British responses to the Holocaust (with a particular interest in the Kindertransport, Holocaust Memorial Day, the institutionalization of British memory of the Holocaust in museums and memorials, the creation and evolution of Holocaust Memorial Day, the Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission report Britain’s Promise to Remember and creation of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation);
Dark tourism/Holocaust tourism; commemoration/memorialization of mass death

Find out more - our PhD Theology and Religion page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Research

My current research focuses on (1) the memory and representation of the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz; (2) the return documentaries of the British Holocaust survivor Kitty Hart-Moxon; (3) current debates relating to the representation of the Holocaust in museums; (4) the ways in which archival photographs of the Holocaust are used and ‘reused’.

Other activities

Programme leader of the interdisciplinary MA Holocaust and Genocide
Deputy Head of Education, School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham
Member of the Committee of the British Association for Holocaust Studies
Member of the editorial board of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History

Publications

Books

(Ed.) with Kay Read, Suffer the Little Children? Reflections on the Cross, Urban Violence and Sacred Space (Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2001)
A War against Memory? The Future of Holocaust Remembrance (London: SPCK, 1996)
(Ed.) with Jon G. Davies, The Sociology of Sacred Texts, (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993)

Selected articles and chapters in books

‘The absent, the partial and the iconic in archival photographs of the Holocaust’ in Visualizing Jews through the Ages: Literal and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism (eds. Hannah Ewence and Helen Spurling) (London & New York, 2015): 265-293.
‘Emerging from the shadows? The Auschwitz Sonderkommando and the “four women” in history and memory’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 20:3: 145-70, published online 3 June 2015
‘The Absent, the Partial and the Iconic in Archival Photographs of the Holocaust’, Jewish Culture and History, Special issue: Image Conscious: Jewish Visuals and Visualising Jews through the Ages 12:3 (2012): 439-62, published online 23 October 2012
‘Post-Holocaust Jewish Interpretations of Job’ in Michael Lieb, Jonathan Roberts & Emma Mason (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 488-501
‘Swimming against the Tide: Melissa Raphael’s Contribution to the Study of Jewish Religious Responses to the Holocaust’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 15:3 (2011) 28-46
‘Yad Vashem and the “Hot” Topics in Christian-Jewish Relations Today’ in No Going Back: Letters to Pope Benedict XVI on the Holocaust, Jewish-Christian Relations and Israel (eds. C. Rittner & S.D. Smith), (London: Quill Press, 2009)
Where He is? This is Where - Hanging Here from this Gallows. An Exploration of the Child-hanging Scene in Elie Wiesel’s Night in Natalie Watson and Stephen Burns, eds. Exchanges of Grace: Essays in Honour of Ann Loades (London, 2008)
‘Negotiating the Marketplace: The Role(s) of Holocaust Museums Today’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 4:1 (2005) 63-80
‘“Telling the Tale”: The Self-Representation and Reception of Elie Wiesel’ in Edward Kessler & Melanie Wright (eds) Themes in Jewish-Christian Relations. Orchard Academic (Cambridge 2005)
‘“A War against Memory?” Nativizing the Holocaust’ in John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell (eds.), Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide, Volume 3: Memory (eds. J.K. Roth & E. Maxwell), (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)
‘The Possibility and Plausibility of Divine Abusiveness or Sadism as the Premise for a Religious Response to the Holocaust’, Journal of Religion and Society 2 (2000)
‘Responses to Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Contemporary Christian-Jewish Relations’ in Dan Cohn-Sherbok (ed.), The Future of Jewish-Christian Dialogue (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1999): 31-48

Encyclopedia and dictionary entries

‘Ecumenical Deal’ (p. 137), ‘Holocaust’ (pp. 190-191), ‘Holocaust Memorial Days’ (pp. 192-193) and ‘Museums’ (p. 304) in Edward Kessler and Neil Wenborn (eds.), A Dictionary of Jewish-Christian Relations (Cambridge, 2005)
‘Wiesel, Elie’ in Martin Davie et al, New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic, Second Edition (London & Downers Grove, 2016), pp. 958-59
‘Holocaust – Judaism’ in Dale C. Allison, Jr. et al (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, volume 12 (Berlin & Boston, 2016): 83-88

Educational-related publications

‘Challenges for Theological Training’ in Carol Rittner, Stephen D. Smith and Irena Steinfeldt (eds.), The Holocaust and the Christian World: Reflections on the Past, Challenges for the Future (London: Kuperard, 2000): 189-91.
Auschwitz and the Politics of Commemoration, Holocaust Educational Trust Research Papers 1:5 (1999-2000)
Christian Responses to the Holocaust, Farmington Papers: Philosophy of Religion 5 (Oxford: Farmington Institute for Christian Studies, 1999)

View all publications in research portal