Claire Le Foll

Claire Le Foll is Professor of East European Jewish History and Culture at the University of Southampton, UK (Parkes Institute/History). She specializes in the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is interested in the interethnic relations in the Western borderlands of the Tsarist and Soviet empires, and more specifically in Belarus. In her first book she explored the development of the Vitebsk Art School in the context of the Russian avant-garde of the quest for a Jewish art. In her second book, she looked at the relation of Jews of the Belorussian provinces to the administrative, political, and cultural idea of Belorussia. She has published many articles on the political and cultural interactions of Jews and Belarusians in literature, art, cinema, and scholarship in pre-revolutionary and Soviet Belarus.