Robert Jan van Pelt’s original research focused on the history of symbolic interpretations of the Temple of Jerusalem and the Tabernacle of Moses. Subsequently it shifted to the (construction) history of the Auschwitz death camp, which then led to his involvement in the battle against Holocaust denial. Involvement as an expert witness on Auschwitz in a high-profile trial that pitted a notorious Holocaust denier against an American academic forced him to perfect his forensic analysis of the Auschwitz gas chambers and crematoria ovens, which helped inform the new sub-discipline of “forensic architecture,” famously centred at Goldsmith College, London, UK. Besides researching and writing a few major books on Holocaust history and editing a unique concentration camp diary, van Pelt completed in 2023 a decade-long research project on the architectural, military, medical and social history of the (pre-fabricated) wooden barrack. The Barrack, 1572–1914: Chapters in the History of Emergency Architecture will be published in November 2024. In recent years van Pelt has become increasingly interested in ways to communicate his work to a broader public. He is the chief-curator of a major traveling exhibition on Auschwitz, which first opened in Madrid in 2017 and which is now on show in its sixth venue in Boston, with a showing at the ROM in Toronto planned for 2025. The Evidence Room, which represented his forensic work on Auschwitz at the 2016 Venice Biennale, has since been shown at the ROM, the Hirshorn Museum in Washington DC, and will open later this year in Detroit. As member of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Centre in Kyiv, Ukraine, he co-commissioned the Babyn Yar Synagogue—a revolutionary design authored by Manuel Herz—and curated a show on it at the Koffler Centre for the Arts in Toronto. Since early 2023 van Pelt also works as co-curator of the new permanent exhibition of the new Montreal Holocaust Museum.
View University Professor Robert Jan van Pelt's faculty profile.