Am Planetarium 7 | 07743 Jena
Phone: +49 (0) 3641 9 44070
Mail: anastasia.felcher(at)gmail(dot)com
Anastasia Felcher is an academic specializing in historical research, cultural heritage studies, and archival work. She is a visiting faculty member in the Cultural Heritage Studies Program at the Central European University in Vienna and also holds the position of Archivist for the Slavic collection at the Blinken OSA Archivum in Budapest. In addition, she has recently been involved in projects with the Invisible University for Ukraine and the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure. Anastasia's scholarly interests are centered on the cultural history of borderlands in East-Central Europe, memory studies, and minority histories. She has conducted extensive research and published her findings on topics such as the memory of the Holocaust after 1944 and 1989, post-Soviet de facto regimes, the veneration of Alexander Pushkin outside of Russia, and heritage discourses in East-Central Europe, with an emphasis on Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova. She is currently completing her first monograph under the working title “Jewish Heritage in Transition: Memory, Preservation, and Manifestation after the Cold War”. Anastasia has been the recipient of several prestigious research fellowships, such as the Gerda Henkel Fellowship at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, the Gerda Henkel Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies Sofia, the Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Eastern Europe – Global Area” at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, the German Historical Institute Fellowship, the International Visegrad Fund Fellowship at the Blinken OSA Archivum, and the Visiting Fellowship at the European University Institute. Anastasia's doctoral dissertation, defended at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, centered on the politics surrounding the preservation of Jewish heritage and its representation of museums, as well as the memory of the Holocaust within the newly independent states.
This research aims to investigate fractures and continuities in responses to Babyn Yar before and after 1989/91. It looks at transnational and transcultural reactions to WWII murder in Babyn Yar throughout the Cold War and after the fall of the Soviet Union. The research aims to shed light on the people, groups, and communities that were engaged in interpreting the shootings during the Cold War on a global scale. It interprets convolutions of memory over Babyn Yar as a vantage point through which one can better understand a variety of gordian knots of memory that are persistently present in the region for decades. In the USSR, Babyn Yar was synonymous with the Holocaust. The project aims to emphasize memory and knowledge generation among the paths that contributed to this phenomena both domestically and internationally. The research also investigates how the transnational Holocaust memory canon and the newly constructed memory framework in Ukraine affected the transformation of a particular canon of memory over Babyn Yar that was shaped during the Cold War. Lastly, the research examines the degree to which Babi Yar's transnational memory aided in the global comprehension and acknowledgement of Ukraine both before and after the USSR collapsed, particularly in light of the ongoing war.
Anastasia Felcher, ‘Jewish Lives in the Cold War and Beyond: The Blinken OSA Archivum Jewish Studies Collection’, S.I.M.O.N. – Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation 10, no. 2 (2023): 166-175 special issue Precarious Archives, Precarious Voices. Expanding Jewish Narratives from the Margins.
Anastasia Felcher, ‘The 1990–92 Armed Conflict at the Dniester River: Continuous Memory Confrontation’, Cultures of History Forum. Debating 20th-century History, Negotiating History and Memory in the Public Sphere (September 19, 2022).
Anastasia Felcher, ‘New Sites of Worship: Sovietization and Literary Museums in Western Borderlands, 1940-79’, in Transforming Author Museums, edited by Johan Schimanski, Ulrike Spring and Thea Aarbakke (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2022), 199-228.
Anastasia Felcher, ‘Alexander Pushkin as Foreign Heritage: Transformation and Cultural Disintegration in post-Soviet Societies’, CAS Sofia Working Paper Series 12 (2022): 1-24.
Anastasia Felcher, ‘Recent Public Discourses on Anti-Jewish Violence in Moldovan History, 1991–2019,’ Holocaust and Genocide Studies 34, no. 1 (2020): 80-100.
Please find more information on Anastasia Felcher on the websites of the Central European University and the Blinken OSA Archivum.