Isabel Wollaston

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 (1991-1992) before moving to the University of Birmingham.

Isabel is a member of the British Association for Jewish Studies, the British Association for Holocaust Studies, and the European Association for Holocaust Studies. 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, and served on its committee (2015-2022). Isabel was a member of the Home Office’s Holocaust Memorial Day Strategic Vision Group (2002-2005) and has served on the Academic Advisory Boards of the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations, Cambridge (1998-2006), and the National Holocaust Centre and Museum. Laxton, Nottinghamshire (2015-2017). She was Editor of Reviews in Religion and Theology (1997-2005). Isabel has been a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy since 2020.

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’.