Lecturer in Musicology, Dr Daniel Elphick, conferred as member of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, the leading academic centre of its kind in Europe.
Dr Daniel Elphick
The Holocaust Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London, is the leading academic centre of its kind in Europe. Founded in 2000, it is internationally recognised for its research, teaching, public advocacy and creative work.
The Research Centre’s mission is to promote research into the Holocaust, its origins and aftermath, and to examine the extent to which genocide, war and dictatorship can be understood as defining elements in the history of the twentieth century. It is an international, interdisciplinary forum, bringing together researchers working on different aspects of the Holocaust in areas including history, literary and language studies, film and media studies, philosophy and sociology.
Reception of Holocaust commemoration in Soviet music
One the conferment, Dr Elphick comments:
"I’m delighted to be joining the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway. I’m a musicologist specialising in Russian and East European music, and I’ve published on Soviet, Russian, and Polish composers and music. I’m particularly interested in how politics shapes music and music-making, and this is especially pronounced in Soviet and East European music of the twentieth century."
"Writing on Weinberg’s music in my PhD led to my first book, Music Behind the Iron Curtain: Weinberg and his Polish Contemporaries (CUP, 2020). Since then, I have been interested even further in musical commemoration of the Holocaust but especially pieces written by Soviet authors. I’m currently working on projects relating to Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony (1962), ‘Babi Yar’, and a larger project exploring the contexts and reception of Holocaust commemoration in Soviet music."
"Part of my undergraduate teaching in the Music department at Royal Holloway includes the module ‘Music & the Holocaust’, which introduces these issues, and I hope to develop this teaching material into a larger project."
"The Holocaust Research Institute appeals to me because of the rich body of scholarship developed over many years, particularly regarding artistic responses to the Holocaust; I’m excited to complement and expand this work with discussion of music’s role within these conversations."
About Dr Daniel Elphick
Daniel Elphick is a musicologist interested in questions of music and politics, especially in East-European and Russian music. Dan studied at Keele University and the University of Manchester and joined Royal Holloway in 2017. Dan’s work on Holocaust topics includes music-making within Holocaust contexts, but focuses especially on music written in commemoration of the Holocaust. Since his PhD, Dan’s work has included a special focus on the Polish-Jewish-Soviet composer Mieczysław Weinberg, who left an extensive amount of music written in commemoration, including the opera The Passenger. Dan is currently working on a study of Holocaust commemoration within Soviet music, including Shostakovich, Weinberg, and more. Dan is the author of Music Behind the Iron Curtain: Weinberg and his Polish Contemporaries (2020) and co-editor (with Stephen Downes) of Constructing Polish Musical Identities Outside of Poland since 1880: Sounding ‘Polish’ (2026). Dan is a Fellow of the Centre for Russian Music at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a convenor of the Slavonic and East European Music study group of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES). His teaching at Royal Holloway includes the undergraduate module ‘Music & the Holocaust’.
