Dr Tom Lawson

Research Interests

My research interests are primarily in Holocaust Studies and in modern religious history. My first book, The Church of England and the Holocaust combined these interests. At the moment I am particularly interested in responses to and representations of the murder of Europe's Jews, and am currently working on a study of the development of historical understanding of the Holocaust after 1945. I am also joint-editor of the interdisciplinary journal Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. In terms of modern religious history, I am continuing to explore the history of religious responses to political extremism particularly in Britain. I am also interested in questions of identity in inter-war Britain, and am also working towards a history of the idea of Europe in English culture after the Great War. I would be delighted to supervise PhD research in any area of these areas, but particularly projects focusing on the memory and representation of the Holocaust, or the response, in its widest sense, of the Christian world to the persecution and murder of Europe's Jews.

Email - Tom.Lawson@winchester.ac.uk

Publications

Books

Edited with James Jordan, The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia (Vallentine Mitchell, 2008)

The Church of England and the Holocaust: Christianity, Memory and Nazism (Boydell and Brewer, 2006) 

Articles

'Bishop Bell and the Trial of German War Criminals: a Moral History', Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 21, No. 2, 2008

‘Reconstructing Christendom: Survivors of the Shoah and Religious Rhetoric in Post-War Britain’, Johannes Dieter-Steinert, Beyond the Camps and Forced Labour (Secolo Verlag, 2008)

‘The Church of England and the German Past, Present and Future: A Case Study in the International Search for a Usable Past’, Gavin Schaffer & Monica Riera (ed.) The Lasting War: Society and Identity in Britain, France and Germany after 1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

'The Free-Masonry of Sorrow? English National Identites and the Memorialisation of the Great War in Britain, 1919-31’, History and Memory, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2008

‘Shaping the Holocaust: Understanding the European Jewish Tragedy in Christian Discourse, 1945-2005’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2007

‘The Myth of the European Civil War’, in Richard Littlejohns & Sara Soncini (eds), Myths of Europe (Rodopi, 2007)

‘New (and Old) Perspectives on the Catholic Church and the Holocaust’, Holocaust Studies: a Journal of Culture and History, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2005

‘Constructing a Christian History of Nazism 1945-49: Anglicanism and the Memory of the Holocaust’, History and Memory, Vol. 16, No. 1, 2004

‘The Anglican Understanding of Nazism: Placing the Church of England’s Response to the Holocaust in Context’, Twentieth Century British History Vol. 14, No. 2, 2003

‘Ideology in a Museum of Memory’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2003

Forthcoming:

"I was following the lead of Jesus Christ': Christian anti-fascism in interwar Britain', in Nigel Copsey & Andrejz Olechnowicz (eds) Varieties of Anti-Fascism (Routledge, 2009)