Alfred Landecker Lecturer

Dr Eliana Hadjisavvas

e.hadjisavvas@bbk.ac.uk

Eliana Hadjisavvas is Alfred Landecker Lecturer at the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism and School of Historical Studies, Birkbeck. She is a historian of migration and displacement in the British Empire and is currently undertaking a five-year funded research project on Jewish displacement and detention in the British Empire, particularly in southern and eastern Africa.  From 2018 to 2021, Eliana was the Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She has also held fellowships at the Library of Congress’ Kluge Center in Washington D.C and New York University’s Remarque Institute.  

Eliana’s research focuses on social and political responses to migration, with particular interest in histories of detention and empire. As Alfred Landecker Lecturer, her project will offer the first comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of Jewish displacement in the British Empire, reconfiguring our understanding of the Holocaust beyond central Europe and through a global lens. The project aims to uncover the neglected histories of detention sites for European Jewry in Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East by asking how, and to what extent, did Britain’s network of colonial detention camps for Jewish refugees define British responses to migration and minorities in the twentieth century and beyond? It will also consider how the history of Jewish displacement before and after the Holocaust, intersects with legacies of empire and decolonisation more broadly.

Book

  • Imperial Internment: Britain, The Holocaust and the Cyprus Detention Camps, 1946-49 (in preparation).

Book Chapters

  • ‘”From Dachau to Cyprus” – Jewish Refugees and the Cyprus Internment Camps: Relief and Rehabilitation, 1946-1949’, in D. Stone, C. Schmidt and S. Bardgett (eds.) Beyond Camps and Forced Labour (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Journal Articles

Eliana teaches on the undergraduate BA History module ‘The Contemporary World’.

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