Research Topic
Mediating memories : Teachers and the Holocaust in France and England
Supervisors: Robert Gildea and Laura Tisdall
Heather uses oral history to analyse the historical memory of secondary school teachers who have taught in England or France between 1990 and 2018. She uses teachers' memory as a medium to understand the multifaceted construction of collective memory, particularly with regards to the Holocaust. Heather is interested in the persistence of national mythologies of the Holocaust in education, the multidirectionality of memory, including how Holocaust memory and education interacts with postcolonial memory and memory of other genocides.
Beyond her research, Heather is interested in teaching history for peace, reconciliation and the prevention of identity-based conflict, particularly in tertiary education, school textbooks and digital resources, and in post-conflict & post-genocidal settings. In 2017/18 Heather worked at UNESCO, in the Section for Global Citizenship Education on projects relating to education about the Holocaust and the prevention of genocide. In 2018, she travelled to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the organisation Remembering Srebrenica.
Heather is a Senior Scholar at Lincoln College. She holds the Sloane Robinson Foundation Graduate Award in partnership with the AHRC.
Before commencing her research studies, Heather qualified and worked as a secondary school teacher, in Essex (United Kingdom) and in Cologne (Germany).
