Professor Chloe Paver researches the work of history museums in Germany and Austria, in particular those that cover the Nazi era and Holocaust. Some of these are Jewish museums, which have their own particular histories in Germany and Austria. Other museums focus on the experience of the non-persecuted majority, though always with a concern for how majority choices affected persecuted minorities. Chloe’s work on the material legacies of National Socialism, as displayed in the museum, culminated in the monograph Exhibiting the Nazi Past: Museum Objects between the Material and the Immaterial (Palgrave, 2018). Increasingly, she works on the discursive practices that weave in and out of museum exhibitions. This includes the rhetoric of speeches given at the opening ceremony of an exhibition, which, through their repetitions, reveal the discursive codes in mainstream German memory of the Holocaust and Nazi regime. She is beginning to work on related codes and practices: walking tours, translation, and figures of Europe in the museum. She has a particular interest in the use of texts in Easy Read (leichte Sprache) to make museums accessible for people with learning disabilities.

Email: C.Paver@exeter.ac.uk