Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums book cover
1st Edition

Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums

Edited By

Diana I. Popescu

Copyright Year 2023


ISBN 9781032115870
Published November 29, 2022 by Routledge
298 Pages 12 B/W Illustrations
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GBP £120.00

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Book Description

Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums is the first volume to offer comprehensive insights into visitor reactions to a wide range of museum exhibitions, memorials, and memory sites.

Drawing exclusively upon empirical research, chapters within the book offer critical insights about visitor experience at museums and memory sites in the United States, Poland, Austria, Germany, France, the UK, Norway, Hungary, Australia, and Israel. The contributions to the volume explore visitor experience in all its complexity and argue that visitors are more than just "learners". Approaching visitor experience as a multidimensional phenomenon, the book positions visitor experience within a diverse national, ethnic, cultural, social, and generational context. It also considers the impact of museums’ curatorial and design choices, visitor motivations and expectations, and the crucial role emotions play in shaping understanding of historical events and subjects. By approaching visitors as active interpreters of memory spaces and museum exhibitions, Popescu and the contributing authors provide a much-needed insight into the different ways in which members of the public act as "agents of memory", endowing this history with personal and collective meaning and relevance.

Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums offers significant insights into audience motivation, expectation, and behaviour. It is essential reading for academics, postgraduate students and practitioners with an interest in museums and heritage, visitor studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and tourism.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Visitors at Holocaust Museums and Memory sites

Diana I. Popescu

Part I: Visitor Experience in Museum Spaces

  1. Mobile Memory; or What Visitors Saw at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum                 Michael Bernard-Donals

  2. Visitor Emotions, Experientiality, Holocaust, and Human Rights: TripAdvisor Responses to the Topography of Terror (Berlin) and the Kazerne Dossin (Mechelen)

    3. Stephan Jaeger

  3. "Really made you feel for the Jews who went through this terrible time in History" Holocaust Audience Re-mediation and Re-narrativization at the Florida Holocaust Museum

    4. Chaim Noy

  4. Understanding Visitors’ Bodily Engagement with Holocaust Museum Architecture: A Comparative Empirical Research at three European Museums

    5. Xenia Tsiftsi

  5. Attention Please: The Tour Guide is Here to Speak Out. The Role of the Israeli Tour Guide at Holocaust Sites in Israel

    6. Yael Shtauber, Yaniv Poria, and Zehavit Gross

  6. The Impact of Emotions, Empathy, and Memory in Holocaust exhibitions: A Study of the National Holocaust Centre & Museum in Nottinghamshire, and the Jewish Museum in London

    7. Sofia Katharaki

  7. The Affective Entanglements of the Visitor Experience at Holocaust Sites and Museums                         Adele Nye and Jennifer Clark

    8. 　

    Part II: Digital Engagement Inside and Outside the Museum and Memory Site

  8. "…It no longer is the same place": Exploring Realities in the Memorial Falstad Centre with the ‘Falstad Digital Reconstruction and V/AR Guide’

    9. Anette Homlong Storeide

  9. "Ways of seeing". Visitor response to Holocaust Photographs at ‘The Eye as Witness: Recording the Holocaust’ Exhibition

    10. Diana I. Popescu and Maiken Umbach

  10. Dachau from a Distance: The Liberation during The COVID-19 Pandemic

    11. Kate Marrison

  11. Curating the Past: Digital Media and Visitor Experiences at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

    12. Christoph Bareither

  12. Diversity, Digital Programming, and the Small Holocaust Education Centre: Examining Paths and Obstacles to Visitor Experience

    13. Laura Beth Cohen and Cary Lane

    Part III: Visitors at Former Camp Sites

  13. The Unanticipated Visitor: A Case Study of Response and Poetry at Sites of Holocaust Memory

    14. Anna Veprinska

  14. "Did you have a good trip?" Young people’s Reflections on Visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Town of Oświęcim

    15. Alasdair Richardson

  15. Rewind, Relisten, Rethink: The Value of Audience Reception for Grasping Art’s Efficacy                             Tanja Schult

  16. "The value of being there" -Visitor Experiences at German Holocaust Memorial Sites

    17. Doreen Pastor

  17. "Everyone Talks About the Wind": Temporality, Climate, and the More-than Representational Landscapes of the Mémorial du Camp de Rivesaltes

    18. Ian Cantoni

  18. Guiding or Obscuring? Visitor Engagement with Treblinka’s Audio Guide and Its Sonic Infrastructure

Kathryn Agnes Huether

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Editor(s)

Biography

Diana I. Popescu is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck Institute for the study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London. Popescu’s research focuses on public history and public reception of violent histories, particularly of the Holocaust. Her work looks at the ethics and the aesthetics of representing racial violence in public art, museum exhibitions and memorial projects and at how members of the public engage with and respond to such representations.