Alexandru Bar

Alexandru Bar is one of the PhD students funded by the AHRC project ‘Performing the Jewish Archive’. His research interests include Romanian-Jews in avant-garde movements, Romanian-Jewish history and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Jewish identity in the context of the politics of national unification in Greater Romania.

Within the project, Alexandru is working in collaboration with the Theatre Company Blah Blah Blah and the Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association Leeds to create a series of interactive workshops in response to the consistent demand from schools for talks from Holocaust survivors. The aim of this project is to create an interactive workshop which creates a more engaging and artistic experience for school students and their teachers and it is in the spirit of the ‘Performing the Jewish Archive’ project, which is motivated by a desire to recover archival materials, and to stimulate the creation of new works to re-animate existing archival repositories in order to establish a link between past, present and future. This project focuses on the volunteer speakers who are picking up from where the eyewitnesses have left off and looking at how they can engage young people in schools. We want to convince schools that these volunteer talks can be as effective in encountering the stories of the Holocaust as meeting a living witness.

Alexandru is supervised on his PhD by Dr Helen Finch who is also part of the ‘Performing the Jewish Archive’ project.

Alexandru completed a master’s degree in Political science and Political Communication from Tel Aviv University. BA political Science from the University of Bucharest (Romania)