Professor Gilly Carr

I am a Fellow of St Catharine's College, a Member of the McDonald Institute of Archaeological Research, and University Professor in Conflict Archaeology and Holocaust Heritage at the Institute of Professional and Continuing Education (PACE), where I am also Academic Director in Archaeology. I am also a member of the 12-strong UK delegation of IHRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the forthcoming Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre in Westminster, and a Partner of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre.

I work in the field of Conflict Archaeology and Heritage Studies with a current specialism in Holocaust heritage, and recently chaired an International five year IHRA project which wrote an international charter to safeguard Holocaust heritage in the 21st century. IHRA adopted the charter in the winter of 2023 at its plenary meeting in Zagreb and it was launched at the European Commission in 2024. From 2023-24 I co-ordinated the Lord Pickles Alderney Expert Review, which calculated how many people were brought to Alderney as forced and slave labour and how many died during the German Occupation. In 2025 I was given an OBE in the King's New Year's Honours List for services to Holocaust research and education.

I have a strong research interest in the heritage and archaeology of internment and imprisonment of all kinds, and my eighth monograph, A Materiality of Internment, was published by Routledge in 2024. This book examined the material culture of civilian internees in Germany in WWII and what it can show us about the experience of internment. My eighth edited volume was published the year before: British Internment and the Internment of Britons, co-edited with Rachel Pistol, was published by Bloomsbury Academic (2023). Recent excavations have included Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany with Professor Claudia Theune (University of Vienna), the Flossenbuerg sub-camp of Svatava with Dr Pavel Vareka (University of West Bohemia), and the Warsaw Ghetto with Dr Jacek Konik (Museum of Independence).

I have many previous research projects. These include a digital heritage web-based project on Channel Islander victims of Nazi persecution, The Frank Falla Archive. This has been produced in collaboration with Freie Universitat Berlin, funded by the German EVZ foundation, and has put online the profiles of 125 concentration camp and Nazi prisons and the biographies of the c. 200-250 islanders who were deported to these institutions. As a spin-off from this project, a teaching pack has been prepared for the Holocaust Educational Trust. My museum exhibition associated with this project, 'On British Soil: Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands', was on at the Wiener Library for the study of Holocaust and Genocide from October 2017 to March 2018, and Guernsey Museum from March to May 2019. My book of the same title, published by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, accompanied the exhibition.