Maritime

The Parkes Institute is an active member of the University's SMMI, the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute.

Based in a port city with a maritime history closely connected to the history of Jewish and non-/Jewish transmigration from Eastern Europe to the United States, the Institute was home, between 2000 and 2005, AHRC Research Project on "Port Jews", studying cosmopolitan port cities and their Jewish communities in Early Modern and Modern History. Continuing and broadening this concept, we since have engaged in the development of Jewish Maritime Studies, a new and innovative research area that connects Jewish history and culture to the sea, to seafaring, to ports and port cities which have "experienced a greater cosmopolitanism than other urban settlements, producing particular forms of the expression of Jewishness, blurring categories of local, national and global" (Tony Kushner).

Ongoing research projects will be dedicated to the transnational dimension of Jewish emigration, particularly from Germany after 1933, which led thousands of European Jews - across the oceans - to ports of refuge in Tel-Aviv, New York, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, or Sydney. The Institute has partner institutions in most of these cities, and plans for cooperation will put an emphasis on Jewish Maritime Studies.

Tony Kushner

My main research area is British Jewish history in the late 19th and 20th centuries covering the social history of British Jewry, immigration issues and responses to the Jews. I also have strong interests in the Holocaust (especially liberal democratic responses and post-war representation), refugee movements, immigration and ethnicity in modern British history and general issues of history, representation and the heritage industry.

Joachim Schlör

My interests are wide ranging from urban studies (the history and perception of cities such as Berlin, Tel-Aviv, or Odessa), topography (the role and meaning of space in history and culture, the history of Jewish forms of settlement), migration (the history of German Jews in Palestine/Israel, but also in Britain and the United States), and archives (the study of connections between historical events and the archival collections in a European context).