Dr Isabel Wollaston BA, PhD (Dunelm)

• BA
• PhD (Dunelm)
• Senior Fellow, Higher Education Academy

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.

Undergraduate

• How do we know what (we think) we know about the Holocaust? 
• Auschwitz in History and Memory
• Historical and contemporary debates on the Holocaust
• God beyond borders
• Dissertation preparation

Postgraduate

• Dissertation Preparation and Guided Reading (Holocaust and Genocide)
• Historical and contemporary debates on the Holocaust
• Auschwitz in History and Memory
• Interfaith relations and issues

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.

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’.

• Programme leader BA History and Theology (Joint Honours)
• Deputy Head of Education (Quality Assurance), School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion, University of Birmingham
• Member, Academic Advisory Board, UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation
• Member of the editorial board of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History