Max Silverman

Profile

I joined the University of Leeds in 1986 and have been a professor since 2000. I was Head of the Department of French from 1999-2002 and  Director of Research and Innovation of the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies from 2011-2015. Between 2007-2011 I co-directed with Professor Griselda Pollock an ARHC-funded project titled ‘Concentrationary Memories and the Politics of Representation’ which examined the concentrationary universe and its assimilation into contemporary popular culture. The first major outcome of this project, ‘Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955)’, won the Kraszna-Krausz prize for the best book on the moving image (2012). I retired in 2023 and am now Emeritus Professor.

Research interests

I work on post-Holocaust culture, postcolonial theory and cultures, and questions of memory, trauma, race and violence. My monograph ‘Palimpsestic Memory: the Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film’ (Berghahn, 2013) considers the connections between the Holocaust and colonialism in the French and Francophone cultural imaginary. I have published four co-edited books with Griselda Pollock on the theme of the ‘concentrationary’: ‘Concentrationary Cinema’ (Berghahn, 2011), ‘Concentrationary Memories’ (I. B. Tauris, 2014), ‘Concentrationary Imaginaries’ (I. B. Tauris, 2015) and ‘Concentrationary Art’ (Berghahn, 2019). My recent work questions traumatic memory studies in relation to contemporary Lebanese film.

• Concentrationary Memories: The Politics of Representation
• PIN: Postcolonial Intellectuals and their European Publics

Qualifications

• BA East Anglia, 1975
• Ph.D. Kent, 1981