Selma Leydesdorff

Country: 
Netherlands
Biography: 

Selma Leydesdorff is Professor of Oral History and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She has been interviewing extensively on the Jewish community of Amsterdam, on the concentration camps of Mauthausen, and has participated in the Forced Labor project directed by the University of Hagen. She is one of the principal editors of the series Memory and Narrative (Transactions Publishers). She has been teaching oral history and life stories mostly in Amsterdam but also in China, Georgia, Istanbul, and Suriname. Her research on the stories of the victims of Srebrenica has received a lot of attention in the Netherlands and is seen as an important critique of the politics of the government and the silence and complacency about these matters. Some major publications include: We lived with Dignity, The Jewish proletariat of Amsterdam 1900-1940 (Wayne State Un. Press 1998) and the International Yearbook for Oral History and Life Stories, Vol. IV special issue: With L. Passerini and P. Thompson, Gender and Memory, Oxford 1996 (reprint 2005).