Call for Papers: Materiality and Precarity: Preserving Holocaust Memorial Sites – DAAD 

25-26 June 2025 | University of Cambridge, UK (Paper Proposals Due April 14,  2025)

This two-day workshop at the University of Cambridge, in partnership with DAAD Cambridge, invites graduate and early career researchers to share emerging research on challenges to preserving Holocaust sites. As the final generation of Holocaust survivors passes away, the utility of original Holocaust sites—including slave labour camps, extermination sites, and ghettos—becomes ever more important as tools for evidencing and teaching about the Holocaust. While ideological and physical challenges for the preservation of these sites—such as political controversy and the impact of “wear and tear”—have existed since the establishment of museums and memorials, other dangers to these sites, such as the physical erosion posed by climate change, the growth of mass tourism, and the rise of Holocaust relativism—have become more pressing in recent years.

This workshop takes up the history of contemporary challenges to preserving Holocaust sites from interdisciplinary perspectives, understanding that Holocaust memory and its representation in sites are influenced by such diverse factors as popular literature, mass media, national politics, museum development, and environmental change. We invite scholars from fields of heritage studies, history, literary studies, tourism studies, museums studies and more to contribute. Our goals are to outline the most pressing contemporary issues in Holocaust site preservation, through both individual site analyses and macro-studies of preservation efforts and analyse attempts by curators and heritage authorities to facing them.

As a result, we welcome proposals on topics included – but not limited to – the following:

  • Evolving interpretations of ‘Authenticity’
  • Climate Change and Memorial Sites; impact, planning, prevention
  • Memorialisation
  • Holocaust tourism
  • Sources of “wear and tear” to physical objects, buildings, and landscapes at Holocaust sites
  • Representing place in cultural and popular media
  • The role of ‘virtual space’ and digital media
  • Political controversies about management of memorial sites
  • Contemporary comparisons between climate change and Nazi genocide
  • Contemporary and historical conflicts over space at sites (national, religious)

The conference format will include a roundtable discussion and the presentation of papers. We intend to use the papers presented at the workshop as the basis for a special issue, which can showcase different approaches to understanding the materiality of memory culture in Holocaust sites and address understudied but deeply practical issues including their “wear and tear”. These papers can help further research activity into questions concerning the conceptual and material spatiality of memorial sites.

Applicants are invited to submit a paper title, short bio (150 words) and abstract (300 words) to Beatrice Leeming (University of Cambridge) rl699@cam.ac.uk and Jonathan Marrow (University of Cambridge) jm2521@cam.ac.uk.

Applications close on 14 April, 2025. There will be funding to support travel costs and accommodation.