Congratulations to Dr Donna-Lee Frieze and Dr Steven Cooke! Their recent publication, The Interior of Our Memories: A History of Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre, received a Commendation in the History Publication category at the 2016 Victorian Community History Awards. These awards are presented by the Public Record Office, Victoria, and the Royal Historical Society of Victoria.

Dr Donna-Lee Frieze is a Genocide studies scholar, specializing in memory and aftermath studies. Donna is a Research Fellow and teaches the Holocaust at Deakin University and a Visiting Scholar at Rutgers University  Centre for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights  She taught a graduate unit, Genocide, for over 10 years and has published widely on the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust and the Bosnian genocides in relation to testimony, film and philosophy. Donna has been invited to speak at Columbia University and to guest lecture at New York University. She was the 2013 and 2014 Prins Senior Scholar at the Centre for Jewish History in NYC. She is currently the Inaugural Genocide Studies Scholar at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre.

Dr Steven Cooke is a cultural and historical geographer with interests in heritage, memory and identity, particularly the management of dark or dissonant heritage, Holocaust museums, memorials and sites, and Historic Urban Landscapes.  Steve spent five years in Higher Education in the UK, first as a Research Fellow and then as a lecturer in Historical and Cultural Geography at the University of Hull. Between 2002 and 2011 he  worked in the some of Victoria’s most significant places, including the Old Melbourne Gaol, the Melbourne Maritime Museum – Polly Woodside and the Shrine of Remembrance. He is a senior lecturer in Cultural Heritage and course director for the cultural heritage and museum studies program at Deakin.  He is also currently an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Winchester in the UK.