Call for papers, postgraduate and early career researcher symposium
The Holocaust Research Institute
Royal Holloway, University of London
April 24, 2026
The Holocaust across the Mediterranean
As historian Michael Marrus’s famous definition of the Holocaust as “the systematic mass murder of European Jewry by the Nazis” suggests, cultural and academic discourses have traditionally afforded little consideration to the extra-European histories and memories of mid-century fascist antisemitism. The past decade and a half has seen a significant broadening of this framing, as scholars have begun highlighting how racial laws and anti-Jewish persecution affected native North African Jews and Muslims (Boum and Stein, 2018; Bottecchia and Oppizzi, 2026), how European Jews sought refuge in Muslim-majority lands to the east and across the Asian continent (Guttstadt, 2013; Cho, Kurlander, and McGetchin, 2025), and how communities across the globe have responded to the history and memory of the mid-century genocide of the Jews (Achcar, 2011; Kissi, 2021; Celinscak and Mehnaz, 2025). These changes accompany a significant shift in the way that Holocaust Studies scholars conceive of the relationship between the Shoah and other, ostensibly unrelated, episodes of mass political violence (Rothberg, 2009; Silverman, 2013; Baer, 2017).
This one-day symposium invites postgraduate students and early career researchers to continue pushing the boundaries of Holocaust Studies by interrogating the scope and reach of mid-century European fascist antisemitism across the Mediterranean Sea and into the African and Asian continents. While we are keen to highlight a variety of scholarly approaches to the topic, we are especially interested in work that highlights the following:
· Persecution and lived experiences of native Jews in French, German, Italian, and British colonial territories
· Relationships between Jews and non-Jews across the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean (including the Balkans)
· Jewish refugees across the Mediterranean region and into the African and Asian continents
· Historical and/or discursive relationships between fascist, antisemitic, and colonial oppression
· Extra-European Holocaust representation and memory
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Please submit a 400-word abstract along with a 100-word biography to Rebecca Glasberg, rebecca.glasberg@rhul.ac.uk, by January 15, 2026. Decisions will be sent to applicants by February 1, 2026.
This event will be held in person at Royal Holloway’s campus in central London and lunch will be provided. Partial bursaries for travel and/or accommodations will be offered according to participant need and available funding.
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Bibliography
Achcar, Gilbert. 2012. The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. Saqi.
Baer, Elizabeth R. 2017. The Genocidal Gaze: From German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich. Wayne State University Press.
Bottecchia, Giordano, and Martino Oppizzi, eds. Between Colonialism and the Shoah: Jews in the Italian and French Colonial Empires – Antisemitism, Persecution, Reparations, and Post-War Reintegration. Upcoming special issue of Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History, to be published in late 2026.
Boum, Aomar, and Sarah Abrevaya Stein. 2018. The Holocaust and North Africa. Stanford University Press.
Celinscak, Mark. 2025. Global Approaches to the Holocaust: Memory, History, and Representation. 1st ed. With Mehnaz Afridi. Contemporary Holocaust Studies. University of Nebraska Press.
Cho, Joanne Miyang, Eric Kurlander, and Douglas T. McGetchin, eds. 2025. German-Speaking Jewish Refugees in Asia, 1930-1950: Shelter from the Storm? Routledge Studies in Cultural History. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Guttstadt, Corry. 2013. Turkey, the Jews, and the Holocaust. First English-Language edition. Cambridge University Press.
Kissi, Edward. 2021. Africans and the Holocaust: Perceptions and Responses of Colonized and Sovereign Peoples. Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Africa. Routledge.
Moses, A. Dirk, and Giōrgos Antōniu, eds. 2018. The Holocaust in Greece. Cambridge University Press.
Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford University Press.
Silverman, Maxim. 2013. Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film. Berghahn Books.