Seminar Series 2025/26

In his talk “When age speaks, youth listens (sometimes),” Craig Lamont, Lecturer in Scottish Studies at the University of Glasgow, explored the centrality of memory studies to his work across disciplines and historical contexts. Drawing on research in literature, history, creative writing, and interdisciplinary collaboration, Lamont presented memory as a key analytical tool.

A central focus of the talk was the distinction between individual memory and cultural memory, as well as between collective memory and collected memory. These nuances were illustrated through a discussion of memory within family narratives, drawing on visual and literary examples. Lamont examined Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s painting “The Father of a Family Reading the Bible to his Children” alongside Robert Burns’s poem “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.” In both works, memory appears as a practice embedded in domestic settings, where intergenerational transmission is staged through acts of reading, listening, and moral instruction. Such scenes link private forms of remembrance to broader cultural narratives and ideas of communal identity.

Craig Lamont is Lecturer in Scottish Studies at the University of Glasgow. Craig has published widely in Scottish literature and history, with a focus on textual editing, print culture, and cultural memory. His monograph The Cultural Memory of Georgian Glasgow was published by EUP in 2021. He is currently the founding co-director of the Memory Lab and the Scottish Catholic Studies Arts Lab at Glasgow. He also works in the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies and the Centre for Robert Burns Studies. Craig occasionally writes short stories, and other pieces (mostly about memory). 

16 March 2026, 16.00-17.00, UCO: School II

Kateřina Králová
Homecoming: Identities and Memory of the Holocaust Survivors and Greece

In her guest lecture, historian Kateřina Králová examined the complex meanings of “homecoming” for Jewish Holocaust survivors from Greece. Tracing a continuum from wartime survival and displacement through liberation and the immediate postwar years, she argued that the desire to return home did not emerge only after liberation but had already taken shape during the war itself within experiences of hiding, flight, forced labor, and deportation.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, including unpublished archival materials, survivor testimonies, newspapers, and her own interviews with survivors, Králová explored how the process of return was shaped by memory, trauma, and shifting political circumstances, such as the Greek Civil War and later patterns of Cold War emigration.

A central aspect of her methodology is the use of extensive life-history interviews. Rather than focusing solely on the Holocaust period, Králová encouraged survivors to share broader autobiographical narratives. These interviews are now accessible for research through the Jewish Museum of Greece and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The lecture also addressed how questions of agency, responsibility, and guilt appear in survivor narratives. While responsibility for persecution was often externalized and frequently attributed to German occupiers or Jewish leadership structures, feelings of guilt were frequently internalized, expressed in reflections on whether more could have been done to save others. Králová also highlighted different forms of silenced memory, ranging from institutional pressures and family dynamics to deeply personal experiences of loss.

Kateřina Králová is a Professor of contemporary history and a memory studies scholar, expert in modern Greek history with a focus on Nazi persecution and Holocaust studies, at Charles University in Prague and the IE Czech Academy of Sciences. Králová has authored key publications, including Das Vermächtnis der Besatzung: Deutsch-griechische Beziehungen seit 1940 (Böhlau, 2016; BpB, 2017), Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941–1946 (Brandeis University Press, 2025), and, most recently, co-edited Fluidity of Memory (Bloomsbury, 2026).

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Das deutsche Volk (2025) is a stripped-back, black-and-white, observational documentary directed by Marcin Wierzchowski that screens the events and above all the aftermath of the shootings in Hanau, Germany, in 2020, in which a far-right extremist killed nine people from ethnic minority backgrounds. Rather than simply recounting what happened on the night of the attacks, the film follows the victims’ families over four years, focussing on their suffering and their struggles for justice, accountability, and commemoration. The film foregoes voiceover narration, staged interviews and reenactments, refusing to focus any sustained attention on the perpetrator. Instead, the film documents grieving families as well as police failures, political inaction and the contested memory politics surrounding plans for a permanent monument.

In this presentation, I will consider both how Das Deutsche Volk documents memory work and also performs it. By focusing on the victims’ families, the film foregrounds multiple competing forms of personal and public memory, including grief, judicial and institutional memory, and grassroots memory activism. At the same time, this documentary film thematically and formally engages in various forms of cinematic memory work, mobilising interest in adjacent causes and itself serving as a lasting monument to the victims. Intervening in debates about the racist violence perpetrated in Hanau, which it subtly positions within the contemporary context of a lurch to the right in German mainstream politics and the historical context of the Holocaust, the film ultimately asks who belongs to the German people (‘das deutsche Volk’), who is considered worthy of being remembered and whose memory is often excluded from public memory?

Dr Paul Leworthy is currently Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University, working on a project entitled ‘Reading Reconstruction: Literary Responses to Rebuilding in Postwar West Germany’. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from The University of Edinburgh. The Shape of Memory: Containers, Surfaces and Forms of Remembering in Post-War European Literature, a gold open access monograph derived from his PhD thesis, will appear this year with Peter Lang. An International Fellow of the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, he is host of the Connecting Memories Podcast series, founding co-Editor-in-Chief of Memory Studies Review, and Publicity Officer of the AGS.

Sport in the Nazi concentration camps and ghettos defies the modern imagination. Relying on long-forgotten memoirs and testimonies, Football under the Swastika reveals the surprisingly powerful role that the most popular wartime sport of football played during World War II. From the earliest days of the Nazi dictatorship, captives played football behind the walls and fences of the Nazi terror state. To these prisoners, the ‘beautiful game’ was a glimmer of joy amid unrelenting hunger and torture, a show of resistance against the most heinous regime the world had ever seen.  Drawing upon survivor accounts and captivating photos and archival film of these heroic individuals, Dr Kevin Simpson (USA) shares his research on wartime football tinged moral ambiguity and offers a reminder why sport matters as a deeply meaningful form of shared human expression.

Dr Kevin Simpson is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas (USA). He is the author of two books on football during the Nazi era and in 2019, Kevin was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to the Slovak Republic. He has been a research fellow three times at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC and has served as a teaching fellow at Yad Vashem (Israel). Dr Simpson shared the Julius Hirsch Honorary Prize for 2021, an award recognizing efforts to combat antisemitism, racism and exclusion in modern European football. Awarded by the DFB— the German National Football Association—the Hirsch Prize recognized the installation of a memorial plaque honoring the forced Jewish laborers who built the football stadium currently being used the Slovak professional football club, MŠK Žilina.  Dr Simpson is also a former college soccer player and a current coach at his alma mater, JBU.