Dr Simone Gigliotti, from the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, has been awarded the Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research (2025).

Her groundbreaking monograph, Restless Archive: The Holocaust and the Cinema of the Displaced (Indiana University Press, 2023; Digital, Open Access) explores the cinematic and cultural geographies of displacement during the Nazi era and in postwar Europe.

The book offers new insights into how film captured the global scale of migration and displacement, drove relief efforts, and pioneered new forms of cinematic storytelling.

Its open-access digital format, which tracks this ‘restless archive’ across time and place, reflects a commitment to accessibility and scholarly innovation.

Dr Simone Gigliotti said of her award: “I am very honoured to receive this award from Yad Vashem.

“Restless Archive illuminates how film archives can be retrieved and gathered in digital platforms and re-used to tell new histories about Jewish refugees and displaced persons during and after the Holocaust.

“I hope the book will inspire authors to embrace new forms of digital communication in their understanding of movement, migration and place.”

The Yad Vashem International Book Prize for Holocaust Research is awarded annually to exceptional published research on the Holocaust and is widely recognised as the field's most coveted and esteemed award program for published Holocaust research.

The award is designed to acknowledge meritorious research, encourage ongoing historical research, and to disseminate accurate information on the Holocaust. Research accuracy, scholarship, methodology, originality, importance of the topic, annotation, and literary merit are key factors in the work’s consideration.