From March 14 to 17, 2025, UVA Jewish Studies co-hosted an international conference, “Dealing with Difficult Pasts: Ethics, Collections, and Public Spaces,” which brought scholars from around the world to the University of Virginia to discuss their research on three different “difficult pasts”: the Holocaust, the history of slavery in the US, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Historians, archaeologists, museum curators, anthropologists, and archivists discussed the methodological and ethical questions raised by trying to research and understand very difficult and painful histories. Despite the many differences between these three historical contexts, participants found fascinating and fruitful connections among their work and learned from each other.  After two days of workshop and conversation, the conference held a public forum with presentations by twelve scholars focused on voices left out, family histories, difficult histories, and the ethics of data, followed by questions from, and conversation with, audience members.

The conference was co-sponsored by the University of Virginia (including the Jewish Studies Program, The Americas Center, the Corcoran Department of History, the Department of African American and African Studies, and the Aesthetics of Democracy Working Group of the Karsh Institute of Democracy); the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the Centre for Public History at Queen’s University Belfast.