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Dr Gilly Carr is Professor of Conflict Archaeology and Holocaust Heritage, and is Academic Director in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. She is also a Fellow and Director of Studies in Archaeology of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. She is a member of the U.K. delegation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the U.K. Holocaust Memorial. She specialises in Holocaust heritage, Conflict Archaeology, and the archaeology, history and heritage of the German occupation of the Channel Islands, where she has written extensively on victims of Nazism. For her work in the Channel Islands she won the European Association of Archaeologists heritage medal in 2020.

Her eighth monograph was recently published by Routledge, titled ‘A Materiality of Internment’, about the material culture created by those in civilian internment camps in WWII and how we can understand the experiences of those interned through the objects they made. Her seventh monograph was ‘Victims of Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands: A legitimate heritage?‘, which analysed the experiences in Nazi prisons and concentration camps of Channel Islanders, based on their written testimonies of this period, and examining their memory and heritage over the last 80 years. The book was published by Bloomsbury Academic.

in January 2024, Gilly led the launch of the IHRA Charter for Safeguarding Sites, an international heritage charter aimed at safeguarding Holocaust sites in the 21st century. She led an international team of experts to write the charter over a five year period.

In 2023, Gilly and Rachel Pistol co-edited a monograph called ‘British Internment and the Internment of Britons’ (Bloomsbury 2023). This book provided an analysis of civilian ‘enemy alien’ internment in Britain, the internment of British civilians on the continent, and civilian internment camps run by the British within the wider British Empire.

Earlier edited volumes included ‘Heritage and Memory of War: Responses from Small Islands‘ (Routledge 2015, co-edited with Keir Reeves), which explored how and why war memory is so enduring in small islands, and how it shapes identity and heritage responses. Previous volumes include ‘Legacies of Occupation: Heritage, Memory and Archaeology in the Channel Islands‘ (Springer, 2014), which discusses the archaeology and heritage of the WWII German occupation of the Channel Islands; and ‘Protest, Defiance and Resistance in the Channel Islands: German Occupation 1940-1945‘ (Bloomsbury Academic 2014), co-written with Dr Paul Sanders (Reims) and Dr Louise Willmot (MMU). A short video, ‘Forgotten Heroes‘, was made about some of this research. The research was supported by the British Academy and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. Older works include ‘Prisoners of War‘ (co-edited with Harold Mytum, Springer, 2013), and ‘Creativity Behind Barbed Wire‘ (also co-edited with Harold Mytum, Routledge, 2012).

Former projects include ‘On British Soil: Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands’, one of several of her museum exhibitions (at the Wiener Library for the study of the Holocaust and Genocide – who made an online exhibition as well – as well as Guernsey Museum). Gilly wrote a book of the same name to accompany the exhibition. Gilly also worked on a digital heritage project funded by the EVZ Foundation (Germany), The Frank Falla Archive, on the Channel Islanders deported to Nazi prisons and concentration camps. Spin-off projects from included a teaching pack for the Holocaust Educational Trust for use in schools. She has also made three BBC documentaries based on this research. Before this she was working on ‘Nazi camps on British Soil’, which concerns the archaeology and heritage of forced and slave labour in the Channel Islands. The focus of this project was Lager Wick forced labour camp in Jersey.

Recent Publications

• ‘The ‘Tangible Intangible’: Positioning ghosts of war as Intangible Cultural Heritage.’ Terrain , 2017
• The Jew and the Jerrybag: the lives of Hedwig Bercu and Dorothea Le Brocq. Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies , 2017 (IN PRESS)
• The Material Culture of Nazi Camps: An editorial. International Journal of Historical Archaeology. DOI 10.1007/s10761-017-0444-z , 2017
• Carr, G. (2017). The Small Things of Life and Death: an exploration of value and meaning in the material culture of Nazi camps. International Journal of Historical Archaeology. DOI 10.1007/s10761-017-0435-0 , 2017
• Carr, G. (2017). Nazi camps on British soil: The excavation of Lager Wick forced labour camp in Jersey, Channel Islands. Journal of Conflict Archaeology. DOI 10.1080/15740773.2017.1334333 , 2017
• Carr, G. (2016) ‘Beyond Surrender: Australian POWs in the Twentieth Century’, Australian Historical Studies 47: 346-7 , 2017
• Carr, G. and Sturdy Colls, C. ‘Taboo and Sensitive Heritage: Labour camps, burials and the role of activism in the Channel Islands’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 22 (9). DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2016.1191524 , 2016
• Carr, G. ‘Illicit Antiquities’? The Collection of Nazi militaria in the Channel Islands. World Archaeology 48(1). DOI: 10.1080/00438243.2016.1152196 , 2016
• Carr, G. ‘The hidden heritage of forced and slave labour: examining the commitment to remembering in the Channel Islands.’ Skrifter [Transactions] 4, The Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. Special issue: Painful Heritage: Studies in the Cultural Landscape of the Second World War, edited by M. Jasinski and L. Sem , 2015
• Carr, G. ‘Have you been offended? Holocaust memory in the Channel Islands at HMD 70.’ Journal of Holocaust Studies. DOI:10.1080/17504902.2015.1103026 , 2015
• Carr, G. and Jasinski, M. A Tale of Two Camps: Lager Wick & SS Strafgefangenenlager Falstad. British Archaeology 139: 44-49 , 2014
• Carr, G. Of coins, crests and kings: symbols of identity and resistance in the occupied Channel Islands, The Journal of Material Culture 17(4): 327-344 , 2012
• Carr, G. Examining the memorialscape of occupation and liberation: a case study from the Channel Islands, International Journal of Heritage Studies 18 (2):174-193 , 2012
• Carr, G. Occupation heritage, commemoration and memory in Guernsey and Jersey, History and Memory 24 (1): 87-117 , 2012

BOOKS

• Carr, G. (forthcoming). On British Soil: Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands. McDonald Institute Publications. (Museum catalogue) , 2017 (IN PRESS)
• Carr, G. and Reeves, K. Heritage and Memory of War: Responses from Small Islands. Routledge , 2015
• Carr, G. ‘Legacies of Occupation: Archaeology, Heritage and Memory in the Channel Islands’. Springer , 2014
• Carr, G., Sanders, P. and Willmot, L. ‘Protest, Defiance and Resistance in the Channel Islands, 1940-1945’. Bloomsbury Academic , 2014
• Carr, G. and Mytum, H. (eds). Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire. New York: Routledge , 2012
• Mytum, H. and Carr, G. (eds). Prisoners of War: Archaeology, Memory and Heritage of 19th- and 20th- Century Mass Internment. New York: Springer , 2012
• Carr, G. Occupied Behind Barbed Wire. Jersey: Jersey Heritage Trust. (Museum catalogue) , 2009
• Carr, G. Creolised Bodies and Hybrid Identities: Examining the Later Iron Age and Early Roman Periods of Essex and Hertfordshire. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports British Series 418 , 2006
• Carr, G., Swift, E. and Weekes, J. (eds). TRAC 2002: Proceedings of the Twelfth Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference, Kent 2002. Oxford: Oxbow Books , 2003
• Carr, G. and Stoddart, S. (eds). Celts in Antiquity. Cambridge: Antiquity Publications Ltd , 2002
• Baker, P. and Carr, G. (eds). New Approaches to Medical Archaeology and Medical Anthropology: Practitioners, Practices and Patients. Oxford: Oxbow Books , 2002

BOOK CHAPTERS

• Carr, G. (submitted) ‘Double vision and the politics of visibility: Landscapes of forced labour’, in James Symonds and Pavel Vareka (eds.), The Archaeologies of Totalitarianism, Authoritarianism and Repression: Dark Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan , 2017 (IN PRESS)
• Carr, G. ‘Denial of the darkness, identity and nation-building in small islands: a case study from the Channel Islands’ in Richard Sharpley (ed.), A Handbook of Dark Tourism. Palgrave, Macmillan , 2016 (IN PRESS)
• Carr, G. ‘A culturally constructed darkness: dark legacies and dark heritage in the Channel Islands’ in G. Hooper and J. Lennon Dark Tourism: Practice and Interpretation. Routledge , 2016
• Carr, G. ‘The uninvited guests who outstaying their welcome: the ghosts of war in the Channel Islands’ in N. Saunders and P. Cornish (eds), Conflict and the Senses. Routledge , 2016
• Carr, G. Resistance material culture in occupied landscapes: the Channel Islands in World War II, in T. Clack (ed.) Material Hybridity: Archaeologies of Contact. Oxford: Oxford University Press , 2016
• Carr, G. (submitted). ‘In the eye of the beholder? Terrorscapes in small places’ in R. van der Laarse and G. Verbeck (eds), Terrorscapes: Memories of Mass Violence in Contemporary Europe. Palgrave McMillan , 2016
• Carr, G. and Reeves, G. ‘Islands of War, Islands of Memory’, in G. Carr and K. Reeves (eds), Heritage and Memory of War: Responses from small islands. Routledge , 2015
• Carr, G. ‘Islands of War, Guardians of Memory: the afterlife of the German Occupation in the British Channel Islands’, in G. Carr and K. Reeves (eds), Heritage and Memory of War: Responses from small islands. Routledge , 2015
• Carr, G. and Jasinski, M. Sites of memory, sites of oblivion: the archaeology of twentieth century conflicts in Europe, pp. 36-55 in M. Bassanelli and G. Postiglione (eds), Re-enacting the Past: Museography for Conflict Heritage. LetteraVentidue. , 2013
• Carr, G. “My home was the area round my bed”: experiencing and negotiating space at civilian internment camps in Germany, 1942-1945, in G. Carr and H. Mytum (eds.) Prisoners of War: Archaeology, Memory and Heritage of 19th- and 20th- Century Mass Internment. New York: Springer , 2012
• Carr, G. God save the King! Creative modes of defiance in Channel Islander internment camps, 1942-1945, in G. Carr and H. Mytum (eds.), Cultural Heritage and Prisoners of War: Creativity Behind Barbed Wire. New York: Routledge , 2012
• Carr, G. Resistance, the body and the V-sign campaign in Channel Islander WWII German internment camps, in J. Symonds, A. Badcock and J. Oliver (eds), Historical Archaeologies of Cognition. London: Equinox Publishing Ltd , 2012
• Carr, G. Dark tourism, bunkers and memorials? A case study from the Channel Islands, in G. Postiglione and M. Bassanelli (eds), Military Archaeological Landscapes: The Atlantik Wall as Case Study , 2012
• Carr, G. Engraving and embroidering emotions upon the material culture of internment, pp. 129-146 in A. Myers and G. Moshenska (eds.) Archaeologies of Internment. New York: Springer. , 2011

Media Coverage

BBC, Channel 4 and Channel TV documentaries, as well as many BBC TV and radio interviews and newspaper articles in the Channel Islands.

Social Media

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Country Focus

British Channel Islands, Europe

Expertise by Geography

British Isles

Expertise by Chronology

20th century

Expertise by Topic

Holocaust & Nazi Persecution, Material Culture, Military, Museums, World War II