Dr Kimberley Czajkowski, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History.

I am a Senior Lecturer in Ancient History, with a research focus on the legal culture of the Roman provinces and the history of the Roman Near East, including the history of the Jewish people under Rome. At base, what I am interested in is how various provincial agents interact with the Roman imperial order, and what those interactions tell us about both parties. Legal transactions often provide a fascinating way into this: different rules and understandings of them meet, are negotiated, and can be recognised or discarded in this process of interaction. There is a very obvious intersection with Jewish history in these themes, as we can think about the interaction of Roman and Jewish legal traditions, the legal situation of Jews under Rome and, indeed, how Jewish communities and individual Jews specifically interacted with the Roman legal culture. 

I am trained across disciplines in Classics (MA Oxon), Jewish Studies (MSt) and Ancient History (MLitt; DPhil); I gained my DPhil in Ancient History from the University of Oxford in 2015. I was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster, Germany (2014-2016). I joined the department of Classics at Edinburgh in 2016, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020. 

Professor Peter Davies, Professor of Modern German Studies.

I have published on the translation of Holocaust testimonies and am the author of Interpreting at the First Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial: How can a witness speak? (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025) and Witness between languages: The translation of Holocaust testimony in context (Boydell & Brewer, 2018). I am co-author, with Hannah Holtschneider, Sheila Jelen and Christoph Thonfeld, of Olga Lengyel, Auschwitz Survivor: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Palgrave, forthcoming 2025), and co-editor with Jean Boase-Beier, Andrea Hammel and Marion Winters, of Translating Holocaust Lives (Bloomsbury, 2018). I am currently contributing to a project on the testimonies of female physicians who survived Auschwitz, and am researching the portrayal of the Holocaust in German audio drama.

Dr Benedikt Eckhardt, Senior Lecturer in Ancient History.

I am an ancient historian with a particular interest in the Hellenistic period. Ever since my PhD thesis of 2011, I have integrated the history of Judaism into my attempts to make sense of Hellenistic and Roman history. These two poles continue to inform much of what I do, in teaching and research as well as in my role as one of the editors of the Journal for the Study of Judaism. My current project, for which I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2025-2027), is a new commentary on the Second Book of Maccabees – a Jewish text preserved in the Septuagint that contains the first documented use of the word “Judaism” (Ioudaismos), understood here in opposition to the equally novel concept of “Hellenism” (Hellēnismos). I hope to be able to understand the cultural conflict that is expressed through these remarkable neologisms within the wider contexts of Hellenistic imperialism and ancient historiography.

Professor Hannah Holtschneider, Professor of Contemporary Jewish Cultural History.

I am a historian of twentieth-century Jewish history, with a particular focus on the consequences of the Holocaust. With Peter Davies, Sheila Jelen and Christoph Thonfeld I have co-authored Olga Lengyel, Auschwitz Survivor: Interdisciplinary Explorations (Palgrave Pivot, 2025). With the same co-authors I am working on a project supported by the Leverhulme Trust entitled Interdisciplinary interpretations of multiple testimonies of female physicians in Auschwitz, while continuing my research on a family correspondence of Jewish refugees from Kassel.