I'm a Social Anthropologist and Oral Historian who's worked on many oral history projects, curated a wide range of exhibitions and made many films in the last 30 years. I co-founded two major oral history archives: the AJR Refugee Voices Archive and the Sephardi Voices UK Archive. I'm currently Director of both projects. I've offered oral history training and helped to launch other oral history projects, and am a member of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London and the Editorial Committee of Jewish Renaissance.
The themes I've been interested in include: the practice of oral history; trauma and memory; diasporas and displacement; nationalism and ethnicity, and the construction of identities.
Since I was young I loved listening to people’ stories and I have been always drawn to record the stories (in sound and image) of men and women who had to leave their homes behind and/or dealt with enormous upheavals in their childhood. I was always curious to find out how people made sense of their lives in views of these displacement. This ‘archival impulse’ might have been inspired by my own ‘post-memory’, to use a wonderful terms coined by Marianne Hirsch, and the survival and displacement of my parents, who were child survivors from Poland and Czechoslovakia of the Holocaust.
As my work has stretched over 30 years and over various geographical spaces, I am so happy that I can give some of my photographs and interviews a home in this website and that I share some of the amazing life histories I have gathered with a general audience. In the future, I hope I can also share my personal family history on this site.
This will not happen overnight. I am sitting on mountains of interviews, unsorted photographs, unsorted documents, letters and other materials. So please be patient while this site is being populated with more and more materials.
If you would like to get in touch with me, please email.
Thank you!
Bea