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Course development and teaching

In 2009/2010 I co-chaired (with Nicola Brace) the production of a new Level 1 psychology module Discovering Psychology (DSE141). Before that I was a member of the production module team for the new Level 1 Social Sciences module Introducing the Social Sciences (DD101/DD131/DD132) for which I authored a chapter on social life of the neighbourhood. I am currently mainly involved in the presentation of Discovering Psychology (DSE141).

Research interests

My main research interests lie in the interdisciplinary study of social and psychological aspects of shared beliefs and social remembering, especially in relation to conspiracy theories, antisemitism and Holocaust remembrance. I am also interested more generally in the relationship between psychology and history.

My first book Conspiracy theories: Serbia vs. the New World Order, published in Serbian in 2006, was based on my PhD thesis which I completed at Loughborough University in 2002. By examining the proliferation of conspiracy theories in Serbian society in the 1990s, this book offered a unique look at a hitherto neglected aspect of Serbian culture, and remains an authoritative account of the rise of conspiracy culture and antisemitism under Milosevic. I recently completed a second monograph on conspiracy theories, published by Palgrave Macmillan. Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction moves beyond the Serbian context and offers an interdisciplinary account of conspiracy theories as a global phenomenon, exploring their political, historical and psychological dimensions.

In 2004-2005, I worked on a project on social remembering and post-communist historical revisionism in Serbia. The project consisted of a case study of the rehabilitation, since the late 1980s, of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic (1880-1956), a controversial Serbian Orthodox Christian theologian, who, having been vilified by the Yugoslav communist authorities as a fascist and antisemite, has come to be regarded within the Serbian Orthodox Christian culture as the most important religious figure since medieval times. By exploring the changing representations of Bishop Velimirovic in the media and in commemorative discourse, I examined the complementary dynamics of repression and denial of controversy which were constitutive of the transformation in Velimirovic's public image. This project yielded a number of journal articles, and the book Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic published in 2008 by Central European University Press.

In 2007 I received funds from the British Academy (under the Small Grants Scheme) for the project entitled ‘History and politics of Holocaust remembrance: Semlin Judenlager in Serbian public memory (1945 to the present)’. This research explored the history of Holocaust remembrance in Serbian society, focusing on the memory of a specific site of Jewish suffering – the Semlin Judenlager. Semlin was the concentration camp in Belgrade where approximately 7,000 Jewish women, children and the elderly were murdered between March and May 1942. For more information on the project and the history of the Semlin Judenlager please visit the project website. A monograph based on this research, which examines the post-war fate of Staro Sajmište (The Old Exhibition Grounds), the site where the Semlin camp was located, was published in Serbian in December 2011.

The main focus of my interest at the moment are testimonies of Yugoslav survivors of the Holocaust. Specifically, I am interested in the institutional, ideological and cultural context of the production, collection, dissemination and reception of testimonies collected after 1989, during the turbulent times of post-communist transition and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Through the analysis of Holocaust survivor testimonies produced in a specific cultural and political context, I am looking to explore broader issues concerning the social and historical contingency of testimony and the complex relationship between – and mutual interdependence of – individual, collected, and collective memory. I began work on this project in early 2011, thanks to the Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship which enabled me to spend three months as a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington, DC.

Recent publications

A selection of my research publications can be viewed at The Open University's Open Research Online.

Books

Byford, J. (2011). Staro sajmište: Mesto secanja, mesto zaborava, mesto sporenja [Staro sajmište: a site remembered, forgotten, contested]. Belgrade: Beogradski centar za ljudska prava.

Byford, J. (2011). Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Byford, J. (2008). Denial and Repression of Antisemitism: Post-Communist Remembrance of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic. (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2008) (A slightly shorter version of the book was published in Serbian in 2005 as Potiskivanje i poricanje antisemitizma: secanje na vladiku Nikolaja Velimirovica u savremenoj srpskoj pravoslavnoj kulturi, Belgrade: HCHRS)

Byford, J. (2006). Teorija zavere: Srbija protiv ‘novog svetskog poretka’. [Conspiracy theory: Serbia vs. ‘the New World Order’]. Belgrade: Beogradski centar za ljudska prava.

Recent journal articles and book chapters

Byford, J. (in press). Between marginalisation and instrumentalization: Holocaust memory in Serbia since the late 1980s. In J. Michlic and J.P. Himka (eds.) Bringing to Light the Dark Past: The Reception of the Holocaust in Post-Communist Europe. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

Byford, J. (in press). Négocier un lieu dans la mémoire collective pour la destruction des Juifs de Serbie : le cas du Judenlager Semlin [Negotiating a place for the destruction of Jews in Serbian public memory: The case of the Semlin Judenlager]. In P. Bertinchamps (Ed.), Staro Sajmište, un camp de concentration. Paris : Non Lieu.

Byford, J. (2011). The collaborationist administration and the treatment of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Serbia. In S.P.Ramet and O. Listhaug (Eds.), Serbia and the Serbs in World War Two: Collaboration and Resistance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 109-127.

Byford, J. (2011). Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic: ‘Lackey of the Germans’ or a ‘victim of Fascism’? In S.P. Ramet and O. Listhaug (Eds), Serbia and the Serbs in World War Two: Collaboration and Resistance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 128-152.

Byford, J. (2011). The Willing Bystanders: Dimitrije Ljotic, ‘Shield Collaboration’ and the Destruction of Serbia’s Jews (1941-1942). In Rebecca Haynes and Martyn C. Rady (Eds.), In the Shadow of Hitler: Personalities of the Right in Central and Eastern Europe. London: I.B.Tauris, pp. 295-312.

Byford, J. (2011). Η «ημιαναγνωριση» του Ολοκαυτωματος: Αναζητωντας μια θεση στη οημοσια μνημη της Σερβιας για την εξοντωση των Εβραιων [‘Half-Recognizing’ the Holocaust: Remembrance of the Semlin camp in Belgrade since the 1980s]. In G. Antoniou, et al. (Eds.) Το Ολοκαυτωμα στα Βαλκανια [The Holocaust in the Balkans]. Thessalonica: Epikentro, pp. 155-206.

Byford J. (2010). “Shortly afterwards, we heard the sound of the gas van!”: Survivor testimony and the writing of history in socialist Yugoslavia, History and Memory 22, no.1, 5-47.

Byford, J. (2007). When I say 'the Holocaust', I mean 'Jasenovac': Remembrance of the Holocaust in contemporary Serbia. East European Jewish Affairs, 37 (1). 51-74.

Byford, J. (2006). ‘Serbs never hated the Jews’: the denial of antisemitism in contemporary Serbian Orthodox Christian culture, Patterns of Prejudice, 40 (2). 159-180.

Byford, J. (2006). Distinguishing ‘Anti-Judaism’ From ‘Antisemitism’: Recent championing of the Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic, Religion, State and Society, Vol. 34(1), 7-31.

Byford, J.T. (2004). From ‘Traitor’ to ‘Saint’: Serbian Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic in Public Memory. Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism series (ACTA), No.22, published by The Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.

Byford, J.T. (2004). Canonisation of Bishop Nikolaj Velimirovic and the legitimisation of religious anti-Semitism in contemporary Serbian society. East European Reports, 6 (4), Part I and Part II.

Byford, J.T. (2003). Anti-Semitism and the Christian Right in post-Miloševic Serbia: From conspiracy theory to hate crime. Internet Journal of Criminology (IJC), available online http://www.internetjournalofcriminology.com/.

Byford, J.T. (2002). Anchoring and objectifying neocortical warfare: re-presentation of a biological metaphor in Serbian conspiracy literature. Papers on Social Representations, 3.1-3.14.

Byford, J.T. & Billig, M. (2001). The emergence of antisemitic conspiracy theories in Yugoslavia during the war with NATO. Patterns of Prejudice, 35(4), 50-63. (also published in Hungarian: Antiszemita összeesküvés-elméletek megjelenése Jugoszláviában a NATO elleni háború idején, Replika (Special issue on Discourse Analysis), 53 (Dec 2005), 55-66.

Teaching publications

Brace, N. and Byford, J. (2012). Investigating Psychology: Key Concepts, Key Studies, Key Approaches. Oxford: Oxford University Press and Milton Keynes: The Open University. (Core text for Level 1 psychology module DSE141 Discovering Psychology. Previously published as Brace, N. and Byford, J. (2010). Discovering Psychology. Milton Keynes: The Open University)

Byford, J. (2009). Living together, living apart: The social life of the neighbourhood. In S.Taylor, S.Hinchliffe, J.Clarke and S.Bromley (Eds.) Making Social Lives, The Open University, pp. 245-288.

A repository of research publications and other research outputs can be viewed at The Open University's Open Research Online.

Last updated: 12 April 2012