Dr Deborah Staines
Macquarie University, Australia
Deborah Staines is a cultural theorist working at the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Macquarie University, Australia. Her principal research interests are cultures of genocide and war, with a special focus on Auschwitz; and theories of trauma, agency and cultural memory, with a focus on archives of life writing. While a visiting fellow at CRASSH, she will address the problem of transmitting Holocaust histories that do not easily fit into the classifications of either victim or perpetrator narratives, of which the Auschwitz Sonderkommando (crematoria workers) are exemplary. Her project asks: What place can the Sonderkommando have in commemorative texts and spaces? Further, what lessons do their stories have for understanding more recent genocidal conflicts in which ambiguities between perpetrators and victims are also found? She is also convening the seminar Writing as Resistance in Times of War and Genocide whilst at CRASSH. Her publications on Auschwitz have appeared in the refereed journals Mortality and Space and Culture and the book Human Rights and Media (Elsevier, 2008). She recently edited Interrogating the War on Terror: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2007), and has published on television and therapy, law and trauma, and online memorialisation.
