Tabea Richardson studied Drama and Theatre studies at the Universities of Winchester and Bochum (Germany) before completing a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism and an MA in International Studies at the University of Sheffield.
Her keen interest in the playing out of historical interrelations of national and cultural identities have led to her academic focus on British and German national identity construction with regards to their historic pasts as well as their differing relations with the State of Israel in the 20th century.
She is interested in researching how differing communities of memory and experience negotiate a shared co-existence in the present. This has led her to focus her current PhD project on the history of what has been called the Christian-Jewish Dialogue in Germany after the Holocaust.
In her thesis entitled
Divisive voices-deliberate vocations: 3 female protagonists and their take on the Christian-Jewish dialogue after the Holocaust; Gertrud Luckner, the activist, Eleonore Sterling, the historian and Jeanette Wolff, the politician
she applies a gendered perspective in assessing the work of three female figures in the institutionalised attempts at creating a dialogue between Christians and Jews in Germany in the 1950s and 60s. In focusing on how the three women acted out their roles in this dialogue in the context of their biographical complexities, religious beliefs (or lack thereof) and professional capacities she hopes to tell the history of the phenomenon away from a male and mostly theological paradigm. Additionally, by concentrating on female actors, of which one was a non-Jewish German, she aims to challenge the axis of separating the history of German Jews from those of the history of Germans. In this way, her thesis takes a critical stance towards the way the Christian-Jewish Dialogue has been used to historicize the relationships between German Gentiles and German Jews after the Second World War on the one hand, but also enhances our insight into the history of German-Jewish women in the decades succeeding the immediate post World War II period.
(Completed: 2021)
