Research Fellows
Philippa Duell-Piening
Philippa Duell-Piening is a Research Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, working on the Australian Research Council-funded Understanding Statelessness in Australia project. Philippa provides secretariat support to the project’s international advisory group and conducts qualitative research.
Philippa undertook her PhD research at Melbourne Law School and has recently submitted her thesis for examination. Philippa’s PhD research focused on rights realisation for people with disability in refugee contexts.
Before commencing her PhD candidature in 2019, Philippa worked at the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture coordinating the Victorian Refugee Health Network. Philippa has also worked in the forced-migration contexts of Timor-Leste in 2002 and on the Thai-Myanmar border in 2012.
Philippa has a Graduate Diploma in International Law, a Master of Community and International Development and a Bachelor of Occupational Therapy. Philippa has published about refugee and disability rights in a wide range of journals.
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.
Dr Marika Sosnowski
Dr Marika Sosnowski is an admitted lawyer and associate researcher at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, Hamburg. In May 2023, she joined the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness as a Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellow. Her primary research interests are in the fields of critical security studies, complex political order, local/rebel governance and legal systems, with a particular focus on the Syrian civil war.