ABSTRACT
The last chapter of the book underlines a great paradox: how a research centre dedicated in the study of discrimination and mass violence was openly discriminating against women. While exploring the use of gender as an analytical tool in the historiography of mass violence and genocide, this chapter attempts to shed light on the historical context of the Columbus Centre in 1960s and 1970s Britain with regard to sexism, misogyny, and homophobia. Through this prism, it focuses on the way in which gender was (or was not) acknowledged in the work and function of the Columbus Centre. More emphasis is be placed on the scholarship and mentality of the academic director Norman Cohn and the social historian Christina Larner, who both contributed to the Centre’s project with their books on witch-hunts. Subsequently, it shifts focus to the role of gender in Holocaust historiography and the way in which it appears in Henry Dicks’s Columbus Series book before moving on to a broader contextualisation of the Columbus Centre and women in the framework of 1960s–1970s Britain.
