Dr Will Jones

Tuesday, 11 February 2025, 4-6pm, followed by a drinks reception

Faculty of Arts Building, FAB 3.30 and Teams

Bio: Dr. William Ross Jones is a Teaching Fellow in Modern History at the University of Warwick, after having recently completed their PhD at the University of Oxford. Their research focuses on the varied forms of sexual(ised) violence experienced by men and boys during the Holocaust, as well as the relationships between gender, testimony, and memory. William's research has appeared or will appear shortly in The Journal of Holocaust Research, Holocaust Studies, La Revue d'Histoire de la Shoah, and Holocaust and Genocide Studies. They will also soon be a published translator with the University of Toronto Press. William is a former Fulbright Scholar to Germany, a former research fellow at the Mandel Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a former USC Shoah Foundation Non-Residential Scholar.

Abstract: This paper will present an overview of my doctoral thesis: ‘So then...he raped me’: Male Experiences of Sexual(ized) Violence in the Nazi Concentration Camps.' It will show that along every step of incarceration and at every moment, Jewish men and boys imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps were made vulnerable to sexual(ized) violence. Utilizing primarily oral testimony, supported by written testimony and contemporaneous documentation, the paper will uncover the experience of sexual(ized) violence—the emotionality, memory, and transmittance of it in testimony. The paper explores these experiences using a methodology that combines emotional readings of testimony with an understanding of masculinity's non-absence which enables one to visualize vulnerability in the silences and gaps of memory. Overall, thepaper argues that the presence of sexual(ized) violence against men and boys should shift understandings of the Holocaust. It shows that even in a genocide in which sexual(ized) violence was not a primary tool of extermination, the violence enacted in its course nevertheless often was sexual(ized) in nature. Moreover, for the victims, sexual(ized) violence was an integral part of their experience. The Holocaust was not just the extermination of Europe’s Jews but included an individually experienced attack on the sexualized and gendered male—as well as female—body along the road to annihilation.