Photographs on display at the Museum’s main exhibition. They feature pre-war images of Jewish residents in Eisiskes, in present-day Lithuania, most of whom were murdered in 1941 by German mobile killing units and Lithuanian forces. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the Shtetl Foundation
The Queen’s University Belfast and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are bringing together leading scholars and practitioners from Europe and North America to Belfast, Northern Ireland, in order to interrogate the challenges facing public historians and Museum professionals as they seek to address difficult or traumatic pasts in various contexts.
Following three days of closed workshops focusing on three case studies—the Holocaust, the legacies of race and slavery in the United States, and the Northern Ireland conflict—the speakers will reflect on the representation of these histories in museums, archives, oral history collections, and public space.
The central questions that will be examined include: How do historians and those who work with history in the public sphere deal with difficult, contested, or traumatic pasts? What are the challenges facing those who seek to engage public audiences with such histories? What objects should and shouldn’t be collected or exhibited? Whose voices get to be privileged in collections, exhibitions and archives and why? What can we do to bring marginalized voices to the center? What representations of the past should or should not be preserved in public space and in archives and museums? How do we decide?
A number of travel bursaries are available to allow early career researchers to attend. Learn more and register.
Register through The Centre for Public History at Queen's University Belfast website. The deadline to register for this free conference is June 2, 2023.
To contact the event organizers, please use the email ctmconference@qub.ac.uk.