Debate: Landscape as a Witness to the Holocaust

Participants:

• Tim Cole is a Professor of Social History and Director of Brigstow Institute, Department of History, University of Bristol. He has wide ranging interests in social and environmental histories, historical geographies and digital humanities and also works within the creative economy. His core research has focused in the main on Holocaust landscapes - both historical and memory landscapes - writing books on Holocaust representation (“Images of the Holocaust/Selling the Holocaust”, 1999), and the spatiality of survival (“Holocaust Landscapes”, 2016) among others as well as co-editing a collection of essays emerging from an interdisciplinary digital humanities project he co-led (“Geographies of the Holocaust”, 2015).
• Caroline Sturdy Colls is a Professor in Conflict Archaeology and Genocide Investigation at Staffordshire University specialising in Holocaust studies.  She teaches in the areas of forensic archaeology, techniques in the identification of human remains and various aspects of crime scene investigation. Her research focuses on the application of interdisciplinary approaches to the investigation of Holocaust landscapes. As part of this research, she completed the first archaeological surveys of the former extermination camp at Treblinka (Poland) and killing sites in Poland and Ukraine among others. In August 2015, she installed a new permanent exhibition entitled “Finding Treblinka” at the Museum of Struggle and Martyrdom in Treblinka based on the findings of her research.

Moderator:

• Roma Sendyka is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology of Literature and Cultural Research at the Jagiellonian University, she runs the Cultures of Memory Research Center and is active in the Curatorial Collective. She is engaged in theories of literary and cultural research, particularly research on visual culture and cultures of memory. She leads a research team implementing the grant “Unremembered Sites of Genocide and Their Impact on Collective Memory, Cultural Identity, Ethical Attitudes and Intercultural Relations in Contemporary Poland” (NPRH 2016, Development). Co-curator of the exhibition “Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust” (2018-2019) in the Ethnographic Museum of Kraków. She is currently working on the theory of non-places of memory and visual research in the context of genocide.