Dr Jordana Silverstein

Overview

Dr Jordana Silverstein is a Senior Research Fellow in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness. 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) and 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).

Jordana has held a Visiting Fellowship at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU in 2019, and 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". 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.

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.