Victoria Bishop Kendzia teaches the course: Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue. Her teaching method, although anthropologically inflected, is interdisciplinary in nature and is, therefore, not limited to the social sciences. It appeals to students from a wide variety of academic backgrounds from history to art, through to geography, theology, and politics. The focus of her work is on the urban landscape, especially, but not only, museums and memorials in and around Berlin.  In this context, locations are approached as field sites that can be read, explored, and critically analyzed as dynamic sites that project and reframe key aspects of history and culture, focusing on issues of interreligious significance.  The urban laboratory that is Berlin is particularly well-suited to this endeavor, given the historical and cultural upheavals it has witnessed during the 20^th century.

She has a background in Museum Studies, having completed her master’s degree in this field from the University of Toronto, Canada in 2001 and her Bachelor of Arts Honours at the same university in 1999.  She has been publishing scholarly articles in her field since 2009 and teaching at the university level since 2008.

In 2013, she obtained her doctoral degree at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Kaschuba and Prof. Sharon Macdonald, with an ethnographic dissertation on visitor experience in the context of political education at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Her book “Visitors to the House of Memory: Identity and Political Education at the Jewish Museum Berlin”, based on her empirical research, is now available:

http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/BishopKendziaVisitors

The book’s introduction:

http://www.berghahnbooks.com/downloads/intros/BishopKendziaVisitors_intro.pdf