Dr. Noah Shenker is the N. Milgrom and 6a Foundation Senior Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University’s Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation. Noah received his PhD in Critical Studies in 2009 from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

His research and teaching traverse Jewish Studies, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Cultural Studies, and Cinema and Media Studies. That interdisciplinary approach was at the center of his first book, Reframing Holocaust Testimony, published in 2015 by Indiana University Press as part of its Modern Jewish Experience series. Organized within a comparative framework, that book looks at three of the most extensive and distinctive archives of Holocaust testimony in the world: the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Noah investigates how the cultural and institutional histories and practices of those sites mediate the encounters between interviewers and interviewees and consider the extent to which testimonies are driven by the agency of witnesses and the itineraries of a given archive.

He is currently working on a co-authored book (with Associate Professor Dan Leopard) entitled Beyond the Era of the Witness: Testimony, Digital Media, and the Afterlives of Holocaust Memory. As that work explores, although still grappling with the aftermaths of World War II and the Holocaust, we are encountering yet another moment of aftermath. The “era of the witness” marked by a consolidation of survivor memory through film, testimonies, and other media, is transitioning to a period when witnesses will no longer be present to anchor representations with their living, moral authority.