UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Education, Language and Arts

 

Dr Jordana Silverstein holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and is a Senior Research Fellow in the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness in the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne, where she uses oral history and archival research methodologies to research histories of stateless people and migration in the Australian settler-colony. 

 

She is the author of Cruel Care: A History of Children at our Borders (2023) and Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (2015) and co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (2016) and Refugee Journeys: Histories of Resettlement, Representation and Resistance (2021).

 
A cultural historian, she researches histories of statelessness, Australian child refugee policies, and Australian Jewish history, focusing on questions of belonging, nationalism, identity, historiography, emotions, sexuality and memory.

 

Jordana is also a chief investigator, together with Madelaine Chiam (La Trobe), Jeremy Farrall (ANU), and Christopher Michaelsen (UNSW) on 'Shaping International Law in Times of Global Upheaval: Australian Experiences', a Discovery Project funded by the Australian Research Council. 

 

During her time in Glasgow, 16-24 June 2025, she delivered a paper on her oral histories of statelessness in Australia research, and worked on an article on the Union of Stateless Victims of Fascism, a post-World War II organisation based in Amsterdam.