Philip Spencer, Senior Research Fellow

Emeritus Professor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Kingston University and Visiting Professor in Politics at Birkbeck, University of London

Philip Spencer is a leading scholar of genocide studies and the study of modern antisemitism. He was the founder and director of the Helen Bamber Centre for the Study of Rights, Conflict and Mass Violence at Kingston University. He set up and directed the pioneering joint European MA in Genocide Studies and Human Rights with the participation of universities in Italy, Germany, and Poland alongside the UK. He is a Trustee of the Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism. He is a member of the European Sociological Association Research Network for the Study of Racism and Antisemitism.

He is the author of many articles on antisemitism and the Holocaust, focusing particularly on the left’s mixed and often problematic responses to both. He has written a number of books including Genocide since 1945 (Routledge, 2012), Antisemitism and the left: On the return of the Jewish question (Manchester University Press, 2017) (with the late Robert Fine), and Nationalism: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2002) (with Howard Wollman).