She attended Oxford and receiving her DPhil in 2008, focusing on the development of Holocaust commemoration in postwar France and Italy.
A fellow of the Royal Historical Society, she held a junior research fellowship at Worcester College before joining the faculty at Swansea University in 2009.
The book also rebukes the popular misconception that the creation of these state-sponsored Holocaust memorials and commemoration activities were the results of governments caving to 'Jewish pressure'.
Rather, Clifford's evidence shows the neither the Jewish communities nor the states were the main agents of change, and that both were relatively latecomers to the grass-roots activist networks of public intellectuals, Holocaust survivors, historians, religious leaders, children of deportees, and others who built a bottom-up movement for the institutionalized of the official Holocaust memory within a country.
The book focused on why and how these memorials took shape at the time they did, or in the words of Professor Laura Jockusch, "the intricate ways in which the past was invoked in the public sphere to serve the needs of the present".