Research Fellows
Katie Robertson
Katie Robertson is a Research Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, focused primarily on the Centre’s domestic engagement. She holds a BA/LLB (Hons) and LLM (Public and International Law) from the University of Melbourne.
Katie is also the Coordinator of the Stateless Children Legal Clinic, which she established in 2021.
Katie’s research focuses on the legal rights of stateless children in Australia, with a particular focus on the legal and administrative barriers faced by stateless asylum seeker and refugee children in obtaining Australian citizenship.
As a human rights lawyer with over ten years of experience, Katie has first-hand experience acting for stateless asylum seeker and refugee children. She is interested in examining the challenges faced by both these children and the legal practitioners assisting them, with the overall aim of improving the quality and accessibility of legal services available to stateless children in Australia.
Katie is Co-Chair of the Stateless Children Australia Network.
Katie balances her time at the Centre with her dual role as the Assistant Director of the Melbourne Law School Clinics and teaches in the JD Program.
Publications:
Katie's full bio and list of publications can be read on LinkedIn Profile and Twitter.
Dr Jordana Silverstein
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.’
Jordana is currently conducting an oral history project on statelessness, working in collaboration with the National Library of Australia and creating an archive of interviews with people who were stateless when they came to Australia during the twentieth century. She is also researching the ways that Australian governments have historically approached statelessness, with a particular interest in Australian involvement in – and response to – the drafting of the UN Statelessness Conventions.
She is 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 In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (Vallentine Mitchell, 2016) and Refugee Journeys: Histories of Resettlement, Representation and Resistance (ANU Press, 2021). Her second monograph, Cruel Care: A History of Children At Our Borders, is forthcoming in May 2023 with Monash University Publishing.
Jordana has held a Visiting Fellowship (with grant) at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU (March-May 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 regular expert commentator in the media and has written for outlets such as The Conversation and Overland, as well as having three times been a judge of the Victorian Premiers Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
A cultural historian and the granddaughter of people who were once stateless refugees, Jordana researches histories of statelessness, Australian child refugee policies, and Jewish history, focusing on questions of belonging, nationalism, identity, historiography, emotions, sexuality and memory.