Dr Jordana Silverstein

Overview

Dr Jordana Silverstein holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (‘Intergenerational Stories of Statelessness: An Oral History Project’) and is a Senior Research Fellow in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness in the Melbourne Law School. Previously she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in History at the University of Melbourne, in the Kathleen Fitzpatrick ARC Laureate Research Fellowship Project ‘Child Refugees and Australian Internationalism, 1920s to the Present.’

She is the author of Cruel Care: A History of Children At Our Borders (Monash University Publishing, 2023), which was a co-winner of the Oral History Australia Book Prize, was shortlisted for the Non-Fiction prize in the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, and was highly commended for the Australian History prize in the NSW Premier’s History Awards.

She is also the author of Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn, 2015) and co-editor of Refugee Journeys: Histories of Resettlement, Representation and Resistance (ANU Press, 2021) and In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (Vallentine Mitchell, 2016) and is the creator and host of the ‘Being Stateless’ podcast (2024).

Jordana has held a Visiting Fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU in 2019. She was awarded the 2021 Marian Quartly Prize for best article published in History Australia in 2020 for her article entitled "Refugee children, boats and drownings: a history of an Australian 'humanitarian' discourse" and the 2023 John Barrett Award, Open Category, for her article “Files, Families and the Nation: An Archival History, Perhaps,” published in Journal of Australian Studies.

She is a CI (with Madelaine Chiam, Jeremy Farrall and Christopher Michaelsen) on the ARC Discovery Project ‘Shaping International Law in Global Transformations: Australian Experiences’ (2023-2027).

She is a regular expert commentator in the media and has written for outlets such as The Conversation, Overland and Crikey, as well as having three times been a judge of the Victorian Premiers Literary Award for Non-Fiction. She sits on the board of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies.

A cultural historian who uses both oral history and archival research methodologies, Jordana researches histories of statelessness, Australian child refugee policies, and Jewish history, focusing on questions of belonging, nationalism, identity, historiography, emotions, sexuality and memory.