Keynote speakers

English Literature, St Catherine’s College, Oxford University

Bart van Es is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and the author of several books on Shakespeare and other Renaissance authors.  In 2014 he began to investigate the lives of his Dutch grandparents, who were active in the resistance during the German occupation and who sheltered a number of Jewish children.  His resulting book, The Cut Out Girl, told the story of one of those children, Lien de Jong.  In 2019 it won overall Costa Book of the Year Prize and the Biographers Club First Biography Prize.  The book is now out in 17 languages.  Van Es currently works in the field of Creative Non-Fiction.  His most recent project, Colt Pixie, is a ‘documentary novel’ set in Shakespeare’s England, due out in January 2025.

Folklore studies, Department of Cultures, University of Helsinki

Ulla Savolainen is a folklorist specializing in memory studies, oral history, and narrative research, with an interest in experiences and expressions related to (forced) migration, transnationality, and materiality. Savolainen’s current research project focuses on memories and experiences of Stalinist repression and displacement of Ingrian Finns. She has analyzed versatile mnemonic practices and media and explored the political and aesthetic values and ideologies related to memory in culture more broadly. Previously, Savolainen has researched the life writings of former Karelian child evacuees in Finland, and explored oral histories of internments of German and Hungarian citizens in Finland in 1944–1946. She has published her research in e.g.  Memory Studies, Poetics Today, Narrative Inquiry, Oral History, and Journal of American Folklore, and she is the co-editor of e.g. The Legacies of Soviet Repression and Displacement: The Multiple and Mobile Lives of Memories (Routledge 2023, with S. Saramo) and Friction, Fragmentation, and Diversity: Localized Politics of European Memories (Amsterdam University Press 2022, with K. Salmi-Niklander et al.).

(Photo by Niclas Mäkelä)

Europen and Transnational History, University of Durham

Rebecca Clifford is Professor of European and Transnational History at the University of Durham in the UK. She is the author of two monographs on the Holocaust, Commemorating the Holocaust (Oxford) and Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust (Yale), and co-author of Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (Oxford). Survivors, her latest book, explores the postwar lives of a group of one hundred child Holocaust survivors, using archival documents and oral history to trace their journeys over seven decades. It was winner of the Yad Vashem Book Prize and the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards Scholarship Prize, a finalist for the Cundill History Prize, and shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize, among other accolades. Both the Telegraph (UK) and the Globe and Mail (Canada) named it a Book of the Year. Clifford is currently at work on a new book on the Lingfield children, a small group of child Holocaust survivors brought to Britain after the war, whose story intertwines with the postwar development of the field of child psychoanalysis.

(Photo by Erika Tanith)