Thursday, 16. February 2012, 18:30

Dachfoyer des Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchivs, Minoritenplatz 1, 1010 Wien

This lecture seeks to examine both the wartime mapping out of ghettos by local officials, and the contemporary mapping of ghettoization by the academic researcher as a way to uncover the shifting motivations and experiences of both Jews and non-Jews during the Holocaust in Hungary. In part, the lecture seeks to contribute to recent scholarship on the Hungarian Holocaust by examining the complex involvement of local officials in implementing crucial elements such as the concentration of Jews. But the lecture also seeks to ask broader methodological questions by considering the potential of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the ‘digital humanities’ to ask-and answer-new questions. In short, the lecture seeks to explore whether geographical approaches have the potential to contribute to the interdisciplinary field of Holocaust Studies in general and study of the ghettoization in particular.

Tim Cole teaches history at the University of Bristol in the UK. He is the author of Images of the Holocaust/Selling the Holocaust (1999), Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (2003) and Traces of the Holocaust: Journeying in and out of the Ghettos (2011). The latter two books explore the spatiality of ghettoization in Budapest and social histories of the Holocaust in Hungary respectively. He is currently working on a new book provisionally entitled Holocaust Landscapes that explores the places and spaces where the Holocaust was enacted, experienced and evaded and has been variously remembered and forgotten in the post-war world. He is involved in co-leading an international research group that applies geographical methodologies and approaches to studying the Holocaust, and is a co-editor of a forthcoming volume on Geographies of the Holocaust.