Professor Cathy Gelbin, Professor of Film and German Studies at the University of Manchester, is a film historian and cultural studies scholar whose work examines European life and its Jewish cultures. Her research spans feature film, video testimony, literary texts and live art, with a focus on Holocaust representation and the development of modern German-speaking Jewish culture. Recent projects explore queer–Jewish intersections in European, Israeli and US cinema, as well as expressions of Jewish dissidence in the GDR.
Before joining the University of Manchester, she held research roles at the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, University of Sussex, and at the Moses Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies, University of Potsdam, where she co-coordinated Germany’s first Holocaust video testimony project, Archiv der Erinnerung, in collaboration with Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive.
Her visiting fellowships include the Moses Mendelssohn Centre, the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, the Selma Stern Centre at Humboldt University Berlin, and the Bucerius Institute at the University of Haifa. In 2023–24 she contributed to the Jewish Museum Berlin’s exhibition Another Country. Jewish in the GDR, providing research expertise and materials from her family history.