Andrej Kotliartchouk

Short presentation

Andrej Kotliartchouk is Professor at the Department of History. He defended his PhD in 2006 at Stockholm University. His research focuses on the ethnic minorities and mass violence, the memory of World War II and the Nazi genocide of Roma.

Research

Hi is PI of the ongoing project Witnessing for the future. Holocaust, Sweden and Forgotten Early Testimonies (project participants are Karin Kvist Geverts and Simo Muir) funded by the Swedish Research Council. The purpose of the project “Witnessing for the future” is twofold: first, to gather previously unknown, unused and neglected Swedish sources on the Holocaust and the Genocide of the Roma, and second, to investigate the nature and influence of the Swedish and transnational “ecologies” in which the witnessing took place. We utilise Hannah Pollin-Galay’s (2018) concept of “ecology of witnessing”, according to which survivors do not face the task of remembering alone but incorporate the conversations and textual conventions around them. The research will be carried out in three case studies. Andrej Kotliartchouk investigates early testimonies of Roma genocide survivors in Sweden. Simo Muir investigates the Yiddish language literary sources that discuss the Holocaust, and the survivors encounter with Sweden, written in Sweden and beyond. , and Karin Kvist Geverts will explore if, how and when these minority narratives surfaced and how they were acknowledged, ignored, misunderstood in the public debate. The interlinked stories of the Jewish and Roma survivors are in the focus of our research interest, and the project will create new knowledge on the Holocaust and the Genocide of the Roma as a Swedish and transnational event.

In 2018-2023 he was a project leader of the project Memory Politics in Far-Right Europe: Celebrating Nazi Collaborationists in Post-1989 Belarus, Romania, Flanders and Denmark (funded by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies). The project anthology On the Digital Front-Line. Far-Right Memory Work in Baltic, Central, and East European Online Spaces (co-edited by F. Zavatti) was published in 2023 in the series Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia. His most recent publications include “En marge du génocide. La Seconde Guerre mondiale et la radicalisation de la politique étatique antitsigane dans les pays scandinaves”, in Revue d’histoire de la Shoah. Persécution des Roms et Sinti et violences génocidaires en Europe de l’Ouest, 1939-1946 (Paris, 2023), and “Babi Yar and the Nazi Genocide of Roma: Memory Narratives and Memory Practices in Ukraine” (Nationalities Papers, 2022).