Dr Dominic Williams

I gained a PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of Leeds, and since then have worked teaching English Literature, Art History and Jewish History and Culture at Leeds, Reading, York St John and Southampton universities. I was Montague Burton Fellow in Jewish Studies at Leeds from 2016 until my appointment at Northumbria in Sept 2019. Like my teaching, my work is deeply interdisciplinary, and is often collaborative. Many of my recent projects have been carried out with Nicholas Chare (University of Montreal), with whom I have co-edited two and co-authored four books. In Matters of Testimony (2015), we engaged with the ‘Scrolls of Auschwitz’, the manuscripts written by the prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers of Birkenau, the Sonderkommando (SK). Following on from that work, The Auschwitz Sonderkommando (2019) considered post-war witness borne by survivors of SK in trials, memoirs, video interviews and films. I have also published articles and chapters on cultural representations of the SK. My research therefore addresses general questions of Holocaust testimony, memory and representation.