Dr Isabel Wollaston BA, PhD (Dunelm)

Dr Isabel Wollaston

Department of Theology and Religion
Associate Professor in Jewish and Holocaust Studies

Contact details

Address
ERI Building
University Âé¶¹¾«Ñ¡
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)
  • Senior Fellow, Higher Education Academy

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 (1991-1992) before moving to the University Âé¶¹¾«Ñ¡.

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.

Teaching

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

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 Âé¶¹¾«Ñ¡.

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 BA History and Theology (Joint Honours)
  • Deputy Head of Education (Quality Assurance), School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion, University Âé¶¹¾«Ñ¡
  • Member, Academic Advisory Board, UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation
  • Member of the editorial board of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History

Publications

Highlight publications

Wollaston, I 2020, . in T Lawson & A Pearce (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Britain and the Holocaust. Palgrave, 2020, pp. 347-364.

Wollaston, I & Williams, D 2019, . in N Chare & D Williams (eds), Testimonies of Resistance: Representations of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando. Berghahn Books, pp. 193-214.

Wollaston, I 2021, '', Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 131-146.

Wollaston, I 2014, '', Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 137-170.

Wollaston, I 2015, '', Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 28-46.

Recent publications

Book

Wollaston, I & Read, K 2001, . University Âé¶¹¾«Ñ¡ Press.

Wollaston, I 1996, . SPCK, London.

Article

Wollaston, I 2012, '', Jewish Culture and History, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 439.

Wollaston, I 2005, '', Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 63-80.

Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Wollaston, I 2015, . in H Ewence & H Spurling (eds), Visualizing Jews through the Ages: Literal and Material Representations of Jewishness and Judaism. Routledge Studies in Cultural History, vol. 37, Routledge, London, pp. 265-293.

Wollaston, I 2011, . in M Lieb, E Mason, J Roberts & C Rowland (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible. pp. 488-501.

Wollaston, I, Watson, NK (ed.) & Burns, S (ed.) 2011, . in N Watson & S Burns (eds), Exchanges of grace: essays in honour of Ann Loades. SCM Press, pp. 55-65.

Wollaston, I, Kessler, E (ed.) & Wright, M (ed.) 2005, . in Themes in Jewish-Christian Relations. Orchard Academic, Cambridge, pp. 151-169.

Wollaston, I 2001, . in JK Roth, E Maxwell & M Levy (eds), Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide. vol. 3, Palgrave.

Wollaston, I 1995, . in J Davies, G Harvey & W Watson (eds), Words Remembered, Texts Renewed: Essays in Honour of John F.A. Sawyer. JSOT Supplement Series, vol. 195, Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield, pp. 41.

Wollaston, I 1993, . in The Sociology of Sacred Texts. Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield, pp. 37.

Chapter

Wollaston, I 2009, . in No Going Back: Letters to Pope Benedict XVI on the Holocaust, Jewish-Christian Relations and Israel.

Book/Film/Article review

Wollaston, I 2010, '', Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 61, no. 2, pp. 361-362.

Wollaston, I 2009, '', Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 175-175.

Review article

Wollaston, I 2002, '', Reviews in Religion and Theology, vol. 9:1, pp. 15-23.