Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums

Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums is the first volume to offer comprehensive insights into visitor reactions to a wide range of museum exhibitions, memorials, and memory sites.

Drawing exclusively upon empirical research, chapters within the book offer critical insights about visitor experience at museums and memory sites in the United States, Poland, Austria, Germany, France, the UK, Norway, Hungary, Australia, and Israel. The contributions to the volume explore visitor experience in all its complexity and argue that visitors are more than just ＂learners＂. Approaching visitor experience as a multidimensional phenomenon, the book positions visitor experience within a diverse national, ethnic, cultural, social, and generational context. It also considers the impact of museums’ curatorial and design choices, visitor motivations and expectations, and the crucial role emotions play in shaping understanding of historical events and subjects. By approaching visitors as active interpreters of memory spaces and museum exhibitions, Popescu and the contributing authors provide a much-needed insight into the different ways in which members of the public act as ＂agents of memory＂, endowing this history with personal and collective meaning and relevance.

Visitor Experience at Holocaust Memorials and Museums offers significant insights into audience motivation, expectation, and behaviour. It is essential reading for academics, postgraduate students and practitioners with an interest in museums and heritage, visitor studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and tourism.

Diana I. Popescu is Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck Institute for the study of Antisemitism, Birkbeck, University of London. Popescu’s research focuses on public history and public reception of violent histories, particularly of the Holocaust. Her work looks at the ethics and the aesthetics of representing racial violence in public art, museum exhibitions and memorial projects and at how members of the public engage with and respond to such representations.