EHRI-AT Mission Statement
The mission of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) concerns transnational Holocaust research, memory, and dissemination. EHRI’s greatest challenge is the wide dispersion of original sources and specialist knowledge across many institutions. EHRI has been working since 2010 to overcome the fragmentation and dislocation of knowledge about the Holocaust and to connect materials, institutions, and researchers. The possibilities of research, networking, mediatisation, and representation of digital data in virtual space have opened up new research paradigms: Holocaust research and its dissemination need to be regarded as transnational, transcultural, digital, and interdisciplinary. EHRI has adopted the digital transformation processes from the fields of digital history and digital humanities and sees itself as a motor of new digital methods and tools. Aside from the potential of mobile technology, EHRI understands itself as a scholarly infrastructure for people, connecting various expertise from the field of Holocaust research and dissemination across disciplines and institutions and beyond national logics and politics of history in a long-term and sustainable manner.
The precondition for Austria’s future participation in this European research infrastructure that will emerge from the EHRI project is the formation of an Austrian consortium, EHRI-AT, which will network archives, museums, memorial institutions, and research institutions from the field of Holocaust studies. The VWI is coordinating this establishment phase of the Austrian consortium. The following institutions are also represented in the establishing consortium:
- Austrian Center for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH)
- Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz (CJS)
- Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW)
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- Institute for Jewish History in Austria (Injoest)
- Place for Learning and Remembrance Schloss Hartheim (LGSH)
- University of Innsbruck (LFU)
- National Funds of the Republic of Austria for Victims of National Socialism (Nationalfonds)</li>
- Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)
23./24. April 2022: Connected Histories. Memories and Narratives of the Holocaust in Digital Space, First EHRI-AT-Conference hosted by the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Innsbruck and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI)