Diana Popescu is a Gerda Henkel Research Fellow and an Honorary Research Fellow at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (BISA).
Diana’s current research project, Visual Resistance: Tracing the Evolution of Perpetrator Imagery in Jewish Art, funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, examines how art became a tool of defiance against Nazism for Jewish artists, refugees and survivors, and assesses the influence of early artworks on later depictions of perpetrators.
Her wider research interests include contemporary public history and the public reception of violent histories, particularly of the Holocaust, and questions related to the ethics and the aesthetics of mediating racial violence, especially through contemporary art, immersive technologies and museum exhibitions.
Diana is the editor of Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums (Routledge, 2022), and co-editor of the volumes Performative Holocaust Commemoration in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2021) and Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era (Palgrave, 2015).
Diana was a Research Fellow on the AHRC project ‘Modes of Engagement: Comparing ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ platforms for Holocaust learning’ at the University of Nottingham (October 2021-October 2022), and a Swedish Research Council Early Career Fellow at BISA from June 2015 to August 2019.