Keynote speakers
Prof Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett is Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University and Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. Her books include Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage; Image before My Eyes: A Photographic History of Jewish Life in Poland, 1864–1939 (with Lucjan Dobroszycki); They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (with Mayer Kirshenblatt), winner of two book awards, The Art of Being Jewish in Modern Times (with Jonathan Karp), and Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory (with Jeffrey Shandler), among others.
She was honored for lifetime achievement by the Foundation for Jewish Culture, received the Mlotek Prize for Yiddish and Yiddish Culture, honorary doctorates from the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America, University of Haifa, and Indiana Univeristy, and the 2015 Marshall Sklare Award for her contribution to the social scientific study of Jewry. She was decorated with the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland for her contribution to POLIN Museum. She was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She serves on Advisory Boards for the Council of American Jewish Museums, Jewish Museum Vienna, Jewish Museum Berlin, and the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. She also advises on museum and exhibition projects in Lithuania, Ukraine, and Israel.
Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine is Reader in the Department of Film,
Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research is
located at the interface of museum, memory and media studies with a special
interest in collective processes of remembering and commemorating difficult
pasts and dissonant heritage and their ethical, political, psychological and
aesthetic implications. In her monograph, Mediating Memory in the Museum.
Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia (2013), she probes the shifts in exhibiting
practices associated with the transformation of history museums and heritage
sites into ‘spaces of memory’ with a particular emphasis on the role of
different media and art forms in that process. In 2018 her co-edited volume Picturing
the Family: Media, Narrative, Memory has been published with Bloomsbury. More information
