Nadine Blumer (Ph.D. Sociology, University of Toronto) is affiliate faculty at CEREV and in the History Department at Concordia University in Montreal. Her research focuses on sites of cultural production such as museums, monuments and heritage tourism in order to understand why societies remember some histories of violence while ignoring others. A recent article about grassroots activist responses to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights appears in the Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies (2015). She is currently co-curating an exhibition about marginalized histories of violence called Moving Memory. Working in the burgeoning field of serious-issues (video) games, this exhibit experiments with new methodologies for addressing commemoration of violence and “competitions” over victimhood status. She has published on her long-standing research about the Nazi genocide of Europe’s Roma population in a special issue on counter-monuments in Espace arts magazine (2016) and in The Nazi Genocide of the Roma: Reassessment and Commemoration (Berghahn Books, 2013), the most comprehensive book to date on the experience and representation of the Roma under National Socialism. Nadine is a former research fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and has received research fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Central European University (Budapest), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Jessica Roda is a 2016-2018 SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at CEREV. Having a background in musicology, ethnomusicology and anthropology from France and Canada, her research interests are on the creation and the representation of ethnic and religious identities after social rupture of filiation in the aftermath of war, omission and repression, on heritage-making as well as on intercultural and interreligious dialogue. At CEREV, she will investigate the ruptures and reconstruction of kinship ties among Ex-Ultra Orthodox Jews of Montreal and New York City. An author of over twenty articles, Jessica presents at conferences regularly in French, English and Portuguese as a guest researcher (USA, Brazil, Japan, France) and as a speaker in the academic, associative, community, and cultural milieu. Co-editor with Daniela Moisa of the book Heritage and Cultural Diversity (2015, Presses de l’Université du Québec), she is also Research Associate at the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies and the Groupes Sociétés, Religions et Laïcités (CNRS, GSRL).

Rachel Sandwell is a historian of southern Africa, whose work focuses on gender, race, and the politics of resistance in South Africa. She is currently a FQRSC post-doctoral scholar at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand. At CEREV, she is working on two projects, one on South African public sphere debates over violence against women in exile’s aftermath, and a second on the ethics and practice of oral histories of struggle in South Africa. Recent publications include “Love I Cannot Begin to Explain: The politics of reproduction in the ANC in Exile, 1976-1990” in The Journal of Southern African Studies and “If Not Feminism, Then What? Women’s Work in the African National Congress, 1980-1990,” inWhat is Feminism? Transnational Activisms in the “Second Wave”, (eds) Jennifer Nelson and Barbara Molony (Bloomsbury Press, Forthcoming).

Stephanie Tara Schwartz is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at CEREV, Research Director at the Museum of Jewish Montreal (MJM) and co-editor with David S. Koffman of Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiennes. Her current project “Mapping Moroccan Jews in Montreal: A Social and Digital History” seeks to explore the influence of Moroccan Jewish artists and activists on the city. Through her work with MJM she curated the exhibits Sacré/Profane: Samy Elmaghribi (2015) and Parkley Clothes: 1937 (2014) at Nuit Blanche à Montréal, designed and taught the museums’ tour guide training and summer fellowship program, and helped lead and produce physical and digital walking tours on themes including Hazzanut and Jewish social service in Montreal. She is co-editor with May Telmissany of the book Counterpoints: The Legacy of Edward Said (2010). Her articles on Jewish diaspora, the literature and film of Arab Jews and Jews and multiculturalism in Canada have been published Borderlands e-journal, Canadian Jewish Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East and Critical Inquiries: A Reader in Studies of Canada. She is also Research Associate at the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies.

IN MEMORIAM.Roger I Simon was Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. His research addressed questions of the pedagogical and ethical dimensions of practices of cultural memory particularly as this applied to the remembrance of mass systemic violence. Simon’s work on practices of remembrance and the development of historical consciousness was part of his continuing writing and research devoted to exploring the intersections of social and political theory, cultural practice, and the pedagogy of public history. Towards the end of his life, his writing projects included a consideration of the social and political implications of “remembering together” through social media, an elaboration of the force of an image in artwork intended as a practice of remembrance, a discussion of the development and design of the museum exhibition The Terrible Gift: Difficult Memories for the 21^st Century, and the completion of the book length manuscript Undeserved Grace: Public Pedagogy, Museum Exhibitions and the Re-framing of Archival Photographs of Lynching in America. Simon was the author of The Touch of the Past: Remembrance, Learning and Ethics (Palgrave MacMillian, 2005). His work appeared in the journals: Museum Management and Curatorship, Museum and Society, Memory Studies, The International Journal of Heritage Studies, Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, and Public: Art/Culture/ Ideas.

Jenny Doubt is a 2014 postdoctoral affiliate at CEREV. She received a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Open University, UK and an MA in Colonial and Postcolonial Cultures from University of Sussex. Her dissertation, Performing and Inscribing HIV/AIDS in Post-Apartheid South Africa investigates how cultural texts intervene in debates about HIV/AIDS and help empower the most vulnerable among the HIV-affected in post-apartheid South Africa. Jenny is interested in the potential for cultural production to change consciousness and challenge the social behaviours that contribute to HIV prevalence, and has published in the Journal of Southern African Studies (2013). At CEREV she will curate a multimedia exhibition around a range of South African HIV/AIDS ‘testimonies’ from 2005–2013, exploring the mediation, performance, and circulation of HIV-related cultural products relating to the experiences of HIV-affected individuals.

Joseph Rosen writes about the ways that cultural memory and historical trauma effect ongoing politics. After receiving his PhD in Social and Political Thought from York University, Joseph undertook an FQRSC postdoctoral fellowship at CEREV in which he focused on the role of trauma and testimony in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Joseph Rosen Rosen is currently bringing his research into mainstream media and public forums. He recently published an article in the Walrus magazine, “The Israel Taboo,” that addresses why it is so difficult to talk about Israel in Canada. He was also interviewed about the article on CBC’s Q with Jian Ghomeshi. Since then, Rosen has hosted public dialogues about Israeli-Palestine in different forums. He is currently writing about traumatic nationalism in Quebec, and continues to develop a series of interviews with pro-Palestinian Israeli activists.

Zohar Kfir is a Montréal-based video artist working with experimental video, interactive art and installation. She holds a MFA from Concordia University’s Studio Arts Programme and a MPS from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Zohar has shown her work internationally in galleries and at video festivals. Her artistic practice deploys non-linear narrative to cover a wide range of topics; from poetic meditations to documentary interventions. During 2013, Zohar received a Media Arts Canada Council for the Arts grant to develop her latest project, Shooting Back– an interactive web-‐based documentary art project, which explores life stories and events occurring in Palestine. The basis for this documentary project is video footage from B’Tselem’s video advocacy project, the Camera Distribution Project.

Dr. Sharon Gubbay Helfer is an oral historian and a scholar-practitioner of difficult dialogues, affiliated as Research Associate with the Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies. She recently completed a postdoctoral research project on pioneers of Jewish-Christian dialogue in Québec at the Université de Montréal, where she is a lecturer. As Research Associate with the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia, she worked on the project “Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and other Human Rights Violations” and created a pilot archive of Palestinian Canadian Life Stories. Her current projects include the creation of a pilot archive of Jewish Israeli Canadian Life Stories and the publication of a series of articles on interreligious and intercultural dialogue. Sharon was a CEREV Curatorial Fellow in the Winter of 2012.

Monica Eileen Patterson is a 2012-2014 Banting Postdoctoral Fellow who received her doctorate in Anthropology and History, and a certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan. At CEREV, she is pursuing two projects based on her field and archival research in southern Africa: a monograph examining contested constructions of childhood in late apartheid South Africa, from 1976 to the early 1990s when negotiations for the transition to democracy began; and an experimental exhibit that allows former and current South African children to reflect on their experiences of childhood and explore the meanings of the apartheid past and its present-day legacies. Patterson is coeditor of Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge and Questioning Discipline and Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places.She has also published in volumes including Encyclopedia of South Africa (2011),The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule (2005), and Responsibility in Crisis: Knowledge Politics and Global Publics (2004). Monica is particularly interested in the intersections of memory, childhood, and violence in postcolonial Africa, and the ways in which they are represented and engaged in contemporary public spheres. Visit Monica Patterson’s page at Academia.edu.

Megha Sehdev is a PhD student in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. She has conducted research on domestic violence law in India, exploring its significance across NGOs, courts, and other institutions in New Delhi. Her dissertation research examines domestic violence through transnational networks of knowledge production. She tracks the links between legal developments in India, reports produced by human rights organizations, and decisions made on gender-based persecution claims in the Canadian refugee system. At CEREV Megha is examining how domestic space and temporality become accessible as forms of knowledge. Using notes, files, photos, and other media, she explores how redesigned documentary objects might serve as forms of spatial commentary. Prior to entering the anthropology program at Johns Hopkins, Megha completed a B.A. in South Asian Studies at UBC, and M.A. in Medical Anthropology at McGill. She has also pursued photography at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Megha was a CEREV Curatorial Fellow in the Winter of 2012.

Jill Strauss was the 2012-2013 Fulbright Research Chair in North American Society and Culture at Concordia University, Montreal. Her research involves Restorative Practices and the visual interpretation of narrative and difficult histories. She is also contributing to the Canadian War Museum’s exhibition, “Peace – The Exhibition” and training museum docents. In the US, Jill teaches in the Dispute Resolution Program at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. Jill completed her PhD from the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland in 2010 where she designed an innovative fieldwork project integrating storytelling and visual art for empathy and validation as one way to address a history of mutual humiliation and conflict with an intergenerational group of Catholics and Protestants. The artwork that came out of her doctoral fieldwork was exhibited several times both in Northern Ireland and in the United States. Jill has a Master of Education in Peace Education and Conflict Resolution from Teachers College Columbia University.

Sima Aprahamian has been teaching at Concordia University since 1987. She holds a Ph.D. degree in Anthropology, granted at McGill University. Her current research project is entitled “Narratives of Displacement.” Her research interests include: cross-cultural gender and ethnic identities, community studies, gender/race/class/sexuality, women and development, social inequality, ideologies, literary criticism, the politics of representation, literary responses to genocide, genocide studies, theories of inclusion and exclusion. Her Doctoral Dissertation (based on fieldwork in the Beka’a valley of Lebanon, funded by SSHRC) was entitled The inhabitants of Haouch Moussa: From stratified society through classlessness to the re-appearance of classes. She is a member of MIGS (Montreal Institute of Human Rights and Genocide Studies), the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, the American Anthropology Association, AES, CASCA, MESA, SSS. She has been organizing several panels in academic conferences over the years on literary responses to genocide, feminist perspectives on genocide, as well as publishing and presenting papers on identity issues, gender, genocide.

Max Bergholz is the James M. Stanford Professor of Genocide and Human Rights Studies in the Department of History at Concordia University. His research, which is based on archival documents and oral history interviews, focuses on the micro dynamics of mass violence and post-conflict remembrance in local communities in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia during and after the Second World War. His recent publications include “The Strange Silence: Explaining the Absence of Monuments for Muslim Civilians Killed in Bosnia during the Second World War,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Summer 2010), 408-434 and “When All Could No Longer Be Equal in Death: A Local Community’s Struggle to Remember Its Fallen Soldiers in the Shadow of Serbia’s Civil War, 1955-1956,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2008, (November 2010), 1-58. He is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled None of us Dared Say Anything: Mass Killing in a Bosnian Community during World War II and the Postwar Culture of Silence.

Annette Bhagwati studied Social Anthropology and Art History in Freiburg, Berlin and London. After extensive fieldwork in West Africa (Benin) she received an M.A. in Area Studies Africa (1993) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. In her thesis she examined local aesthetics and evaluative frameworks in oral culture. After graduating, she worked for Artsworldwide, London, and Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin, before she became programme coordinator and in-house curator in the department of Exhibitions, Film, New Media at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin (2001-2006). In this capacity, she coordinated and advised on major international exhibitions, conferences and festival collaborations, with a special focus on African, Asian and Latin American arts and cultures. Exhibitions include “Portrait Afrika. African Portrait Photography”, “The Short Century” (Okwui Enwezor), “subTerrain. Contemporary Art from India” (Geeta Kapur), “Politics of Fun. Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia” (Ong Keng Sen/Gridthiya Gaweewong), “Far Near Distance. Contemporary Positions of Iranian Artists” (Rose Issa), “DisOrientation. Contemporary Art from the Middle East” (Jack Persekian) and “About Beauty” (Wu Hung). Most recently, she has acted as the project director of FORMER WEST at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, wher she is currently the director of the Anthropocene Project until 2014. Annette Bhagwati has taught graduate seminars on Classical and Contemporary African Art at Freie Universität, Berlin, as well as courses on the Exhibition history of non-Western art at Concordia University, Montreal. Her research interests include transcultural curating, global art, African photography, South Asian and South-East Asian contemporary art.

Shelley Butler’s research focuses on museums and heritage sites marked by diversity and inequality, including establishment museums and alternative exhibition sites in Canada and South Africa. Recent publications include essays on township tourism and curating in Slum Tourism: Poverty, Power, Ethics (2012) and on reflexive museology in Museum Theory: An Expanded Field (2014). Her first ethnography, Contested Representations: Revisiting Into the Heart of Africa (2011) is widely taught in museology and public history. Her co-edited (with Erica Lehrer) volume, Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions is currently under review with McGill-Queen’s University Press. At CEREV, Shelley is working to implement a curatorial project entitled Museum Without Walls at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. She was Acting Director of CEREV 2013-14 and continues her involvement as an affiliate and consultant.

Jennifer Carter is Professeure of Nouvelles muséologies, patrimoines immatériels et objets culturels in the Département d’histoire de l’art at the Université du Québec à Montréal, where she teaches courses on the history and theory of museums. Prior to her appointment at UQÀM in 2011, Jennifer held the position of Assistant Professor in the Museum Studies program in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto since 2008. Jennifer conducts research in the areas of museology, representation, and architecture, and considers how these practices mediate, and are mediated by, the cultural institutions that frame them. A more recent research project takes up the emergent phenomenon of human rights museology. She has published essays in Museum Management and Curatorship (Forthcoming, May 2012); National Museums: New studies from around the world (Routledge, 2011); La revue de l’Association québécoise d’interprétation du patrimoine (Montréal, 2010); and Chora Five: Invervals in the philosophy of architecture (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2007).

Karin Doerr teaches German culture, language and literature as well as women’s and genocide studies at Concordia, where she is an associate of the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies and the Simone de Beauvoir Institute. Her main focus is the impact of the Third Reich on language use. She has conducted interviews with Holocaust survivors and translated and edited their writings. Doerr has written and presented on literary responses to the Shoah, on antisemitism in German literature and on integrating the Holocaust into Germany’s university curriculum. She has collaborated with genocide specialist Kurt Jonassohn and co-authored Nazi Deutsch / Nazi-German: An English Lexicon of The Language of the Third Reich with American historian Robert Michel.

Angela Failler (PhD York University, MA Dalhousie University, BA University of Saskatchewan) is Chancellor’s Research Chair, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Winnipeg. She also teaches and supervises for the MA Program in Cultural Studies, and is a Research Affiliate with the Institute for Women’s and Gender Studies. Her current research involves public memory of the 1985 Air India bombings. She is also interested in phenomena at the intersection of culture, embodiment and psychical life and has published writings on anorexia and self-harm in this vein. Most recently, she has taken lead of a collaborative research project on public engagement and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Dr. Failler teaches in the areas of feminist theory, cultural studies, queer theory, embodiment and subjectivity, and communications and media. Image c/o Seaweed Rudy.

Steven High is Canada Research Chair in Public History at Concordia, codirector of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling and principal investigator of a $1.2 million Community-University Research Alliance project entitled “Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations.” High teaches a course in which students examine practical and ethical dilemmas faced in oral history research. He also teaches the course “Memory and the Built Environment.” In addition to supervising a number of graduate students who specialize in public and oral history he will co-teach a Université de Montréal seminar during the coming academic year, focusing on life stories of war and genocide.

Heather Igloliorte joined Concordia’s Department of Art History as Assistant Professor of Aboriginal Art History in the fall of 2012. She recently authored an essay in Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (2011, Palgrave) about the exhibition she curated on behalf of the Legacy of Hope Foundation, “We Were So Far Away”: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools, based on the oral histories of eight Inuit former students of the residential school system. Other recent exhibitions include Decolonize Me (Ottawa Art Gallery, 2011); the online collaborative exhibition Inuit Art Alive; and the forthcoming Labrador Inuit Art Alive (2012), which will draw on oral histories, local archives, and community-based knowledge gathered during her dissertation research on the art history of the Labrador Inuit. Her teaching and research interests include the global exhibition of Indigenous arts and culture, mid-century modernist primitivism, and issues of colonization, sovereignty, resistance and resilience. She is the author of several articles related to this work such as the chapters in Response, Responsibility, and Renewal: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Journey (2009), Inuit Modern (2010), and Negotiations in a Vacant Lot: Studying the Visual in Canada (forthcoming, 2012).

Martha Langford is an Associate Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Art History. Major works include Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); Image & Imagination (MQUP, 2005); and Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (MQUP, 2007). An active independent curator, she was artistic director of the international biennale, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal 2005. In curatorial partnership with Sherry Farrell Racette, Langford was a consultant for Photoquai. Biennale des images du monde 2009 at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris and a curator of Unmasking: Arthur Renwick, Adrian Stimson, Jeff Thomas at the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, 2009-10. Through research, teaching and graduate supervision, Langford joins interdisciplinary conversations about modes of consciousness materialized and sometimes provoked by photographic images, including representations of violence and sociopolitical taboos. Most recently, she has collaborated with John Langford on a study of amateur and popular photographies to consider personal and collective memories of the Cold War from a Canadian perspective. Their forthcoming book is A Cold War Tourist and His Camera (MQUP, 2011).

Loren Lerner is Professor of Art History at Concordia. She has curated exhibitions including Memories and Testimonies/Memoires et Témoignages (Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, traveling exhibition) and Afterimage, an exploration of art works by Canadian women born near or after the end of World War II (Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre). Lerner’s publications include the edited volume Afterimage: Evocations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Canadian Arts / Littérature/Rémanences: Evocations de l’Holocauste dans les arts et littérature canadiens contemporains (Montreal: Concordia Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies, Concordia University, 2002), and articles including “Sam Borenstein, Artist and Dealer:The Polemics of Post-Holocaust Jewish Cultural Identity” (Canadian Jewish Studies/Etudes Juives Canadiennes 12, 2004), “The Aron Museum at Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom in Montreal” (Material Culture Review/Revue de la Culture Matérielle 64, Fall 2004) and with Suzanne Rackover, “Jews in Canadian Art,” Canada’s Jews: In Time, Space and Spirit (Academic Studies Press, 2013), 422-450. Her course offerings have included “The City of Jerusalem: Ideas and Images,” “Curatorial Practice: Global and World Art Studies,” “Hate, Violence and Genocide in North American Art and Theory” and “Canadian Artists of Eastern European Origin from World War II to the Present.”

Krista Geneviève Lynes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia. Her research examines the intersections of video art and documentary in making visible feminist political subjects, as well as multiple visions of social life under conditions of duress, political struggle, human rights abuse or super-exploitation. Her focus on the politics of visibility engages feminist and queer theories, questions of embodiment, gender and sexuality, postcolonial and transnational examinations of culture, questions of witnessing, spectatorship and encounter, psychoanalysis and semiotics. She is currently working on the aesthetics of ‘groundedness’ in representations of popular struggle and protest, as well as on panoramic visions in contemporary social landscape photography. Her manuscript, tentatively entitled Experimental Media, Transnational Circuits: Prismatic Visions and Feminism without Guarantees is forthcoming with Palgrave.

Seth Messinger an anthropologist currently based in Montreal. He is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and is a Focus Area Research Director at the Center for Rehabilitation Sciences Research of the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, MD. His research examines how military service members recover from traumatic injury. He recently published an article entitled “Vigilance and Attention among U.S. Service Members and Veterans” in Anthropology of Consciousness (2013).