The Holocaust Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London, is the leading academic centre of its kind in Europe. Founded in 2000, it is internationally recognised for its research, teaching, public advocacy and creative work.
The Research Centre’s mission is to promote research into the Holocaust, its origins and aftermath, and to examine the extent to which genocide, war and dictatorship can be understood as defining elements in the history of the twentieth century. It is an international, interdisciplinary forum, bringing together researchers working on different aspects of the Holocaust in areas including history, literary and language studies, film and media studies, philosophy and sociology. In 2020, the HRI has joined a new joint endeavour, the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership, alongside the Wiener Holocaust Library, the University of Huddersfield, and the Holocaust Survivors Friendship Association (Leeds); its overarching goal is to mutually strengthen collaborative research, collections development, and public engagement on the Holocaust and other genocides across each of the institutions involved, with an overall aim to promote research-led, high impact work in all three areas across the UK. The HGRP seeks to redress an ever-widening gap between cutting-edge scholarship on the Holocaust and other genocides and public knowledge of these events through a series of dynamic activities, including conducting and disseminating new research; providing new publications and visiting Fellowship opportunities; hosting conferences, seminars, workshops and other educational opportunities, and curating exhibitions and other public engagement.
A founder and core member of the HRI, Barry Langford is internationally recognised as an authority on Holocaust cinema, especially on the place of the Holocaust in the generic and narrative paradigms of mainstream (US, British and European) fiction cinema, and on the representation of the death camps and extermination sites in drama and documentary. A number of Media Arts’ academics are associated with HRI, including Adam Ganz.
