Maiken Umbach
Maiken Umbach is Professor of Modern History at the University of Nottingham, and works as as Chief Academic Adviser and Innovation Officer at the UK National Holocaust Museum on a long-term secondment. Educated at Cambridge, Maiken taught at Cambridge and Manchester for 15 years before joining Nottingham in 2011; she has also held visiting appointments at Harvard, Berlin, Munich (IFZ), UPF Barcelona, and the Australian National University.
Maiken the author of four academic monographs, ten edited volumes and special issues, and numerous articles dealing with European identity politics, Jewish history, the Holocaust, and the use of photos as historical evidence. She strives to bring together insights from academic research and real-world applications in the fight against antisemitism. To this end, she has collaborated with colleagues in Education, Politics, Media Studies, Museum Studies and Human-Computer Interaction. For example, with Gary Mills, she analysed the consequences of a reliance on perpetrator photographs of anti-Jewish violence on UK pupils’ attitudes to Jewish history. With Paul Tennent, she has explored the use of Mixed Reality experiences to prompt museum visitors to re-imagine Jewish history through Jewish eyes. With Hugo Drochon, she has explored the overlap between conspiracy theory thinking and antisemitism. With Claudia Reese, she has published on the curatorial challenges of bringing Jewish diaspora history to life. Her AHRC-funded multi-disciplinary project “Photograph as Political Practice in National Socialism” was selected as anti-racism project of the year 2022 by UKRI.
Maiken has worked with a range of museums, artists and film-makers nationally and internationally to transform the use of visual media to engage audiences with the Holocaust, Jewish history, and contemporary antisemitism. They include Anat Vogman on the film “Nahariya Magica”, about German Jews in Mandate Palestine; Swedish artist Lina Selander on the installation “The Weight of Images”; the Imperial War Museum London’s team of the re-design of their permanenet Holocaust Gallery; and New York-based ‘Tectonic Theater’ on the Auschwitz play “Here are Blueberries”, among others.
At the National Holocaust Museum, Maiken has worked to translate findings from academic research into various multi-media exhibitions and visitor experiences, such as “The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust” (touring exhibition and parallel online learning resource, 2020-22); and “I say British, You Say Jewish” (an exhibition about antisemitism in a mobile trailer touring UK streets in 2023). She is now working on an new international touring exhibition “The Vicious Circle”, to launch on Holocaust Memorial Day 2025, which explores the stories of five Jewish communities from the Nazi era to the present, and the motivations of the pogromists who destroyed them. Maiken also co-leads, with Mark Rusling, the “Racism Response Unit”, supported by the Anglo-Jewish Association, which offers face-to-face training to combat anti-Jewish racism in schools, on university campuses, in local councils, police forces and in the private sector.
