Gilly Carr is University Professor in Conflict Archaeology and Holocaust Heritage, and Academic Director in Archaeology at the Institute of Continuing Education.
She also has additional responsibility for programmes in Heritage Studies, Holocaust Studies, Anthropology, Landscape History and Classical Studies. She is a member of the University of Cambridge's Department of Archaeology and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, and is a Partner of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre. Gilly is also a Fellow and Director of Studies at St Catharine's College. Gilly is also a UK delegate of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance and a member of the academic advisory board for the UK Holocaust Memorial.
Gilly works in the fields of Conflict Archaeology, Holocaust heritage and Heritage studies. Since 2019 she has been chairing the project Safeguarding Site for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) . This has resulted in an international heritage charter (the IHRA Charter for Safeguarding Sites) which was adopted by the 35 member states of IHRA in Zagreb in November 2023 and will be launched by the European Commission in January 2024.
Gilly coordinated the Lord Pickles’ Alderney Expert Review, which launched at the Imperial War Museum in May 2024. The 13 international members of the review identified how many prisoners died in Alderney during the Nazi occupation of the island as well as how many forced and slave labourers were brought to the island. This brought resolution to a subject that has debated for decades.
In 2020, Gilly won the European Heritage Prize, awarded by the European Association of Archaeologists, for her work on victims and survivors of Nazism.
Gilly’s museum exhibitions include ‘On British Soil: Nazi Persecution in the Channel Islands’, which was on at the Wiener Holocaust Library from 2017 to 2018. It moved to Guernsey Museum in 2019. Previous exhibitions have included 'Occupied Behind Barbed Wire', which was shown at Jersey and Guernsey Museums, and which focused on the art and artefacts made by islanders interned in German civilian internment camps during WWII. She has also worked on a Resistance Trail for Jersey, filmed a similar heritage trail for Guernsey, worked on a reinterpretation of the Occupation Tapestry Gallery for Jersey’s 70th anniversary of Liberation, and has headed a digital heritage project called the Frank Falla Archive as well as the newer Occupied Alderney website. She is currently working on bringing Stolpersteine to the Channel Islands as part of her work recognising victims and survivors of Nazism.
Professor Carr teaches in a number of areas within archaeology. Topics include: Conflict Archaeology, Dark Heritage, Holocaust heritage, Iron Age Britain, Introduction to Archaeology, Heritage Studies and Britain and the Holocaust. She also teaches on the Postgraduate Certificate on Britain and the Holocaust. Gilly also supervises a range of dissertations at Certificate, Diploma and Advanced Diploma level and, at the Department of Archaeology, at MPhil and PhD level.
