Iris van Ooijen is a Ph.D. candidate and lecturer at the Arts and Culture Department of VU University in Amsterdam. She holds Master’s degrees in Dutch Law and Cultural Heritage Studies from the University of Amsterdam.

Since May 2010, she has been working on the Ph.D. project ‘Dutch WWII memorial camps as contested space’ at the VU University funded by NWO (Dutch Scientific Research) and supported by the Memorial Centers Westerbork, Vught and Amersfoort. The resulting dissertation will also become the guideline for a joint exhibition at these former camp sites on the afterlife of Nazi terrorscapes in national, European and Jewish memorial culture.

For her EHRI Fellowship Iris van Ooijen conducts research on ‘Topography of memory: representation of the Holocaust at Westerbork and Drancy’. She will use the archives of the Center for Contemporary Jewish Documentation in Paris (CCJD) to examine the development of former transit camp Drancy as a site of memory. Besides memory agents, milieux de mémoire and others who were and are involved in the process of monumentalisation and musealisation of Drancy, Iris van Ooijen will focus on discussions around the representation of the Holocaust, such as the discrepancy between the unrepresentability of the Holocaust and the desire to bear witness of what happened. She also examines the ways in which Drancy was represented after the war in various cultural texts, like books, films and other media as well as its ‘dialogue’ with other Holocaust memorial sites in Paris. To complete her research, Iris van Ooijen uses the Center’s collection to compare the case of Drancy to former transit camp Westerbork in the Netherlands.

Iris van Ooijen was in residence at the Center through June and July 2012. She may be contacted at i.m.a.van.ooijen@vu.nl.