Simone Gigliotti
Royal Holloway, University of London
Dr. Simone Gigliotti is Senior Lecturer in Holocaust Studies in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, and Deputy Director of its Holocaust Research Institute. At Royal Holloway, she is also affiliated with the Centre for the GeoHumanities, and the Centre for Oratory and Rhetoric. She is a Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) (FRGS) and the Higher Education Academy (FHEA). Simone’s research focuses on spatial understandings of Holocaust victim and survivor experiences in oral testimonies, and written, visual and geographic narratives, and exploring how these accounts often intersect with, and differ from, perpetrator, humanitarian and other witnessing perspectives. She maintains research interests in genocide studies, particularly in the use of digital strategies and methods to track indigenous cultural destruction and its recuperation.
She published two co-edited collections in 2020: The Wiley Companion to the Holocaust (with Hilary Earl) and The Holocaust in the 21st Century: Relevance and Challenges in the Digital Age: Lessons and Legacies, Volume XIV (with Tim Cole). She is finalizing a monograph that tracks and analyzes the flight paths of Jewish refugees and displaced persons in contemporaneous newsreels, documentaries, fundraising films, and home movies: On the Trail of the Homeseeker: the Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced. The book uses geographic approaches to follow these materials’ production histories, circulation, and visual geography in terms of a “cinema of the displaced,” building a mobility cartography across shifting scales of experience and global homeseeking locations.
Simone has been involved with other spatial history projects, such as the NSF-funded project, Holocaust Historical GIS, the results of which have been featured at the Spatial History Project (Stanford University) and in published form as Geographies of the Holocaust (2014). She is a research affiliate of the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative.
A StoryMap of publications and papers captures the evolving trajectories of Simone’s research interests and projects.
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