Coming Soon: New EHRI Conny Kristel Fellowship Call and Seminar

EHRI as a permanent organisation has a new governance structure, different from when the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure was run as a project. After first establishing the highest governing organ – the General Assembly –, this week the other important governance body, the National Coordinators Committee (NCC), gathered for the first time. This took place in Zagreb, Croatia – the Croatian National Node being one of the newest members of the EHRI community – in the midst of two full days of meetings.

Chair and Vice-Chair

High on the agenda of the first NCC meeting was the election of a Chair and Vice-Chair. With a unanimous vote, Rachel Pistol was chosen as Chair. Rachel Pistol, who is from the UK, is no stranger in the EHRI community. She joined EHRI in the second phase of the project series and took up leading positions in the following phase where she was a member of the Project Management Board and coordinated dissemination, innovation and virtual access activities. In EHRI’s new setting, Rachel is the Director of EHRI-UK.

She is a digital historian who specialises in immigration and refugee history, Second World War internment in the UK, and refugee trajectories.  She is based at the University of Southampton and is an Associate Advisor to The Wiener Holocaust Library, London. We are very pleased Rachel accepted the position of NCC Chair.

We are also happy to announce that the NCC Vice-Chair is the coordinator from EHRI-Austria, Marianne Windsperger. Her candidacy was again accepted unanimously. Marianne is a researcher at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute (VWI); she  is member of the editorial board of the open access journal S:I.M.O.N. and a co-worker in the VWI Fellowship Programme.

Marianne Windsperger received her MA in Comparative Literature and Romance Studies from the University of Vienna and is a graduate of the Uriel Weinreich Program for Eastern European Jewish History and Culture at the YIVO Institute in New York. She focuses on literary representations of the Holocaust, autobiographical sources, Yiddish literature, and theories of memory.

After the elections, the new Chair Rachel Pistol presided the rest of the meeting.

Working Groups

Next on the agenda was the process of establishing Working Groups within the ERIC. Working Groups, usually dedicated to a theme, can be formed on initiative of a National Node, and after approval can have members from several nodes. Working Groups can therefore be regional or international, and step outside of the national framework. Several first Working Groups will be dedicated to safeguarding and continuing the work done in the EHRI projects, such as the identification and integration of Holocaust sources into the EHRI Portal, and the founding of an Editorial Board for the EHRI Document Blog, the webinar series and podcast. Working Groups will also be formed around more Holocaust research related themes, such as “Ego-documents in Holocaust studies and collections”, or Holocaust education.

National Nodes

The next part of the NCC meeting gave room to the representatives of the eleven National Nodes to present an overview of their plans for the next year. The nodes vary in stages of development; while some are busy forming a network of partners and securing budgets; others are already announcing workshops, national fellowships or a conference. Most national nodes have launched their own websites (both in English and the national language) on which information on their activities can be found.

Restarting in-person services: Fellowships, seminars and workshops

After a short pause due to the transformation from project to ERIC, EHRI Director Reto Speck was happy to announce at the NCC meeting that the Conny Kristel Fellowship Programme and EHRI’s training activities will be resumed later this year. A call for both the fellowships and an international seminar can be expected after the summer.  

Croatian National Node

On that note the first EHRI NCC Meeting was concluded. Other meetings that took place in Zagreb were the General Partner Meeting and Work Package Meetings in the framework of the last EHRI project still running, EHRI-IP (Implementation Phase), dedicated to the realization of the ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium).

The meetings in Zagreb were all very successful. EHRI would like to thank the Croatian National Node, the National Archive of Croatia, and especially Michal Brandl for the hosting and excellent organisation of the event.

To find out more about EHRI’s new organisational structure, visit our Frequently Asked Questions.