Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls delivered the keynote lecture at the “Material Culture and the Holocaust Symposium” this month.

Her paper, entitled “Ordinary Things?: Reconsidering the Value and Representation of Holocaust Material Culture”, drew on a range of examples from recent archaeological investigations at Holocaust sites, and from museum and memorial contexts, to consider the breadth of material culture relating to the Holocaust and the role that it can play in forensic investigation, post-trauma memory making, commemoration and education.

The symposium took place at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC and featured papers by scholars from numerous institutions, including Smithsonian, Stanford University, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Santa Clara University, Santa Barbara University, Salem State University, New York University, the International Center for Jefferson Studies, University of Alabama and the University of Delaware.