This book examines a wide range of works written by and about child survivors and victims of the Holocaust. The writers analyzed range from Anne Frank and Saul Friedlander to Ida Fink and Louis Begley; topics covered include the Kindertransport experience, exile to Siberia, living in hiding, Jewish children masquerading as Christian, and ghetto diaries. Throughout, the argument is made that these texts use such similar techniques and structures that children's-eye views of the Holocaust constitute a discrete literary genre.
More recently I have developed my enthusiasm for cinema-going into teaching film courses, and in 1993 I completed an MA in Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University.
I have been interested in representations of the Holocaust for many years, and have developed this into teaching at undergraduate and graduate level, as well as several books on Holocaust literature and film. Between 2007 and 2011, I was Head of the School of English.
Research interests I am influenced by the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and my research background is in the work of Malcolm Lowry. My publications in the field of literary theory include Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader (1996) and Introducing Bakhtin (1997).
In relation to the Holocaust, I have written about such subjects as novels, in Holocaust Fiction (2000), children´s perspectives, Children Writing the Holocaust (2004), Claude Lanzmann’s classic film Shoah (a BFI Modern Film Classics volume in 2011), and, with Jenni Adams, have edited a volume entitled Representing Perpetrators in Holocaust Literature and Film (2013). book, Textual Deceptions (2014), is on the topic of false memoirs and literary hoaxes. My longstanding engagement with representation of memory has prompted my more recent investigation of the literature of memory-loss and dementia.
My interest in film and television archives led to my 2009 book Jack Rosenthal, and, with David Forrest, Barry Hines: ‘Kes’, ‘Threads’ and Beyond (2017). I have a British Academy Senior Fellowship (2019-20) to write a study of the outtake footage from Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah.