Alon Confino

Alon Confino is a Professor of History at the Department of History at the University of UMass Amherst and Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. The focus of his work revolves around areas of research and theory where the historical method meets ethnography, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies. In his writings over the years, he has sought to craft narratives weaving together story telling with critical analysis. He is the author of The Nation As a...See more

Alon Confino is a Professor of History at the Department of History at the University of UMass Amherst and Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. The focus of his work revolves around areas of research and theory where the historical method meets ethnography, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies. In his writings over the years, he has sought to craft narratives weaving together story telling with critical analysis. He is the author of The Nation As a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (1997); Germany As a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (2006); Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust As Historical Understanding (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012);, and A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014), which won a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. His current research focuses on forced migrations in the 1940s in Central and Eastern Europe, India/Pakistan, and Palestine/Israel, focusing on issues of local history, memory, and human rights. See less