Professor Dan Stone - Professor of Modern History / Director, Holocaust Research Institute

I am a historian of modern Europe with a particular interest in the history and historiography of the Holocaust. My research interests are broad, covering the history of fascism from the perspective of history of ideas; the history of genocide; the history of anthropology, especially the idea of ‘race’; and theory of history. I have published some 90 scholarly articles and 17 books. I teach courses on modern European history and on the Holocaust and I am programme director for the Holocaust Studies MA, the only interdisciplinary MA programme in the UK. I am currently completing a book on the International Tracing Service for OUP and writing a book on the Holocaust for Penguin’s revived Pelican series.

My work tackles complex historical ideas and events and seeks to make them comprehensible to as wide an audience as possible. My scholarly work has been on the ways in which the Holocaust was prefigured in strands of European thought such as eugenics and race theory, and has also grappled with the huge historiography of the Holocaust. In a series of publications aimed at a wider audience, I have addressed the arc of postwar European history (Goodbye to All That? The Story of Postwar Europe, 2014), the end of the Holocaust and the difficulties survivors faced as they sought to rebuild their lives (The Liberation of the Camps, 2015) and the global phenomenon of concentration camps (Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction, 2019). I also write a regular blog for the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right and have written numerous blog entries for OUP, Yale UP, rantt.com, Fair Observer, Open Democracy and other websites. I have been interviewed for a number of documentaries, including Hitler: The Rise and Fall (Arrow Media, 2016) and World War II: Witnesses to War (Like a Shot Productions, 2017). And I have advised on several more, including the award-winning Pass Pass Ghai Auschwitz (Steps to Auschwitz) (Flash Productions, Malta, 2018), the first Maltese documentary on Auschwitz.

I work regularly with the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, speaking at events and teaching my MA modules there. In 2018 I was proud to co-curate an exhibition there on the search for the missing after the Holocaust, Fate Unknown, which is currently being prepared as a travelling exhibition. In 2020 I am also co-curating another exhibition on “death marches” (the forced evacuation of Nazi concentration camps at the end of the war), which will be shown at the Wiener Holocaust Library and at the University of Huddersfield. I am a member of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s Experts Reference Group and of the UK Oversight Committee for the International Tracing Service and have also written for and advised other bodies, such as The National Archives and the Jewish Chronicle. I am also the chair of the academic advisory board for the Imperial War Museums’ redesigned Holocaust Galleries, which opens in London in 2021.

As Director of the Holocaust Research Institute, I am proud to represent one of the leading research institutes of its kind. We offer the UK’s only genuinely interdisciplinary Holocaust Studies MA course, support a rich research environment for a large number of PhD students, engage on a regular basis with outside institutions and the media, run a biennial Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilisation and numerous activities. The HRI is proud to have recently become part of the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership. With the Wiener Holocaust Library, the University of Huddersfield and the Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association (Leeds), the HGRP will conduct research and disseminate it to sections of the population which are usually unable to access information about the Holocaust, especially in the north of England.

More information about my research is available via PURE

Email - d.stone@rhul.ac.uk