Kasia Tomasiewicz completed an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, entitled ‘The Imperial War Museum and British Public Memory of the Second World War’, (2016 - 21), a partnership between the University of Brighton and IWM London.
The project critically engages with the evolution of display and audience interpretation of Second World War galleries at the IWM since 1945. Changes in museology pedagogy and practice in our national museum of war are mapped alongside shifting dominant political, commemorative and cultural landscapes. The IWM is in-part used as a lens by which to understand wider changes and tensions within Britain over the course of the mid-20th and 21st centuries. These include: national identity, gender, marginalized colonial and eastern European histories, and the legacy of the Holocaust, among others.
The overall aim of the project was to shed new light on how Britain has interacted and continues to interact with the Second World War. In addition, Kasia's on-going research informed the permanent Second World War galleries which opened in 2020.