Beatrice LEEMING

Beatrice Leeming is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge in History. She obtained an MPhil in Modern European History, also from Cambridge, after completing a BA (Hons) in History at Durham University.

Her doctoral research considers the impact of the professionalisation of memorial sites associated with National Socialism since the 1990s, cause and consequence of a re-negotiation of ‘authority’ from survivors to stewards. In a transnational, comparative approach, she asks how the historic specificity of the sites, and the profiles of the survivors, informed this transfer, and how the ‘easy-jet-era’ of mass tourism upset or impacted this process. The research considers if, and how, the ‘voice of the visitor’ alters the way sites navigate changes to their functions in anticipation of and beyond the twenty-first century. By considering three case studies (KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau, KZ-Gedenkstätte Mauthausen and the Anne Frank House), all of which redesigned and expanded in their exhibitions, outreach and self-identity at the same time as their survivors dwindled and were replaced by professional-, but not necessarily moral-, ‘experts’, the project is an attempt to understand how sites have and will continue to maintain their significance in dialogue with the diverse audiences they work with.

While in Vienna, she will be working in the archive of the Mauthausen Memorial, as well as conducting fieldwork in the site itself.

Ishai MISHORY

Ishai Mishory is a scholar of Jewish history and religion who focuses on early modern Italy and the early printed book. In the Fall, he will be the incoming Assistant Professor of Judaism and Sustainability at San Diego State University, and is presently a postdoctoral Lecturer at the Department of Religion, Columbia University. Besides the Salo and Jeannette Baron Award, his dissertation research has also been awarded a Fulbright Italy Fellowship and a graduate fellowship at the Center for Jewish History, New York City. He has presented at numerous academic conferences in the United States and Europe. A translator of academic texts and comic books among others, he has also illustrated several children’s books.

Mishory’s first book project, stemming from his dissertation, follows the pioneering printing work of Jewish-Italian humanist Gershom (Hieronymus) Soncino in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in Italy and in the Ottoman Empire. While Soncino is known in the annals of Jewish bibliography mainly for printing religious tomes, Mishory’s microhistorical analysis of five books he printed reveals a ‘secularity,’ a comfort in being-in-the-world, which upends the received temporality of Jewish secularization and suggesting an ‘early modern Jewish secularity.’

While in Vienna, Mishory will continue this research into the early modern period towards his second book project, which deals with the confluence of Christian Hebraism – the sudden, violent rise within Christian circles of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in interest in and scholarship of Hebrew – and the contemporaneous invention of the world’s first ghetto, in Venice. Reading Hebraistic material against the novel forms of cultural, spatial and symbolic enclosure of Jewish people which emerged in Europe alongside it reveals an ‘extractive economy’ of Hebrew and other forms of ‘Jewish knowledge’ from the living Jews of Europe at the time. The proposed research poses the question whether this scholarly and religious movement can be seen as operating within a rising logic of race, i.e. as a “colonial relation prior to the colony,” problematizing the temporality of European race-thinking regarding the Jews and the so-called “boomerang theory” of anti-Semitism.