Digital Exhibition
View the exhibition online now.
In November 2021, the Parkes Institute launched a digital edition of the award-winning exhibition ‘James Parkes and the Age of Intolerance’. The exhibition, which tells the life story of the Institute’s namesake Reverend Dr James Parkes, was originally launched in Southampton in January 2020 as part of the City’s Holocaust and Genocide Memorial Day commemorative event as detailed below. It went on to tour the UK before being forced to halt due to the pandemic. As part of the Institute’s commemorations of the 40th anniversary of Parkes’ death, it was decided that the exhibition would be revived in digital format by the Institute’s Digital Officer, Katie Power.
Travelling Exhibition
This exhibition explores James Parkes’ pioneering work as a tireless fighter against antisemitism in all forms. In the 1930s, Parkes helped to rescue Jewish refugees, and he campaigned for European Jewry during the Holocaust. During the Second World War, Parkes helped found the Council of Christians and Jews (CCJ). As part of his international campaigning and scholarship, Parkes built up a library and associated archive, which was transferred to the University of Southampton in 1964. This library is now one of the largest Jewish documentation centres in Europe and the only one in the world devoted to Jewish/non-Jewish relations.
This exhibition was curated by Dr Chad McDonald, who recently completed a PhD examining the British memory of the Holocaust. He is now a Visiting Fellow in the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton and the Social Media Editor for the internationally-renown journal, Patterns of Prejudice.
The South, West, and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (Arts and Humanities Research Council) generously funded the creation of this exhibition. The exhibition contains materials reproduced with the kind permission of the University of Southampton’s Special Collections.
For any queries about the travelling exhibition, please contact the exhibition’s curator and projector co-ordinator, Dr Chad McDonald (c.d.mcdonald@soton.ac.uk). You can follow him on Twitter @Chad_McDonald.
Click on the links below to find out more about where the exhibition has visited: