Research Team

Professor Joy Damousi
Professor Damousi is an ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow and Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. She is the Chief Investigator of the ARC Funded Child Refugees and Australian Internationalism Laureate Fellowship.

Her publications include: The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge 1999; Shortlisted for the NSW Australian History Prize); Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia (UNSW Press 2005; Winner of the Ernest Scott Prize); Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound (ANU Press, 2007) (ed. with Desley Deacon); Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia, 1840-1940 (Cambridge 2010; Shortlisted for the NSW Australian History Prize); and What Did You Do in the Cold War Daddy? Personal Stories from a Troubled Time (UNSW Press, 2014), (ed. with Ann Curthoys).

In 2015, Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia’s Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War, will be published by Cambridge University Press.

Dr Alexandra Dellios
Alexandra has researched and published on child migration and belonging, popular culture and the history of post-war migrant centres (hostels), and public history and heritage making. She continues to research heritage-making practices within migrant communities and the discursive interactions between grassroots groups and official heritage, specifically in relation to the commemoration of post-war migrant centres. She has lectured and taught in Australian Studies and migrant heritage at the University of Melbourne, where she was awarded her PhD in March 2015. She is currently the administration officer on this ARC Laureate Fellowship Project. Her book on Bonegilla Migrant Centre will be released in August 2017 with MUP.

Sarah Green
Sarah Green was drawn to this project because of her background working with Forgotten Australians (care leavers) and Former Child Migrants; that is, adults who had spent some or all of their childhoods in institutions. This work taught her the importance of bearing witness to, and appreciating the bravery of, adults willing to share their memories of disrupted, fragmented and often painful childhoods. Prior to this, Sarah completed a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Western Australia in 2007 and set off to see the world before moving to Melbourne in 2010 to undertake a Master of Global Communications at La Trobe University. And before all that, she grew up in a little but lovely place called New Zealand.

Madelyne Hudson-Buhagiar
Madelyne Hudson-Buhagiar was awarded a 2016 University of Melbourne Faculty of Arts Indigenous Cadetship, working as part of the ARC Laureate Fellowship Project. Madelyne is a proud Wiradjuri woman, who grew up off country on Arakwal country and now lives and works on Wirundjuri country. She has recently completed her honours in Psychology at the University of Melbourne, with plans to engage in volunteer work before completing her Masters in Clinical Psychology.

Niro Kandasamy
Niro Kandasamy is currently a PhD student at the University of Melbourne. She completed her honours (Class 1) at the University of New South Wales under the supervision of Dr. Karen Soldatic. Since the completion of her undergraduate studies Niro has been working as a Social Research Officer at Western Sydney Information and Research (WESTIR Ltd) where she has been involved in numerous projects for not for profits, Local and State Government. Her wider research interests include the impacts of welfare service provisions on organisations and citizens, refugee resettlement, refugee policy and social inclusion.

Anh Nguyen
Anh Nguyen was a Vietnamese child refugee raised in Carrollton, Texas. She graduated with a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity and Bachelors of Arts in English Literature from Bryn Mawr College. In 2002, she had a postgraduate fellowship from Harvard to conduct research interviews about the acculturation of Vietnamese in Australia. She then worked with Harvard School of Public Health on AIDS research and treatment in Nigeria, and became a bilingual legal aid advocate for Vietnamese immigrants in Boston. She currently works as a paralegal for Native Title Services Victoria and is pursuing her PhD on the oral history of Vietnamese Australian child refugees in Australia.

Dr Jordana Silverstein
Jordana Silverstein is a Postdoctoral Research Associate, researching the history of Australian government policy towards child refugees from 1970 to the present. Before joining this ARC Laureate Fellowship project, Jordana lectured in History at the University of Melbourne (where she completed her PhD in 2009) and was a Senior Research Officer at Macquarie University. Her research has examined histories of modern Jewish identity, memory, sexuality and diasporism, and explored notions of belonging and racialisation, in Australia and the United States. She is the author of Anxious Histories: Narrating the Holocaust in Jewish Communities at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century (Berghahn Books, 2015) and co-editor of In the Shadows of Memory: The Holocaust and the Third Generation (Vallentine Mitchell, 2016).

Dr Rachel Stevens
Rachel’s research focuses on twentieth century American and Australian immigration history. She has published her research in the Australian Journal of Politics and History, Immigrants & Minorities and History Australia. She is currently completing articles on intercultural marriage in Australia, urban multiculturalism and the use of role-play in the history classroom.

Rachel received her PhD in History at Monash University, where she lectured in contemporary history until 2014. She has also been a visiting fellow at New York University (2013), the University of Texas at Austin (2006) and the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UCSD (2006-07).

Dr Mary Tomsic
Mary Tomsic is a Postdoctoral Research Associate attached to the ARC Laureate Fellowship Project. Her broad teaching and research interests are in cultural history in particular visual culture, film and history; historical representations in popular culture; Australian film culture and understandings of gender & sexuality. Her most recent publication is a co-edited collection Diversity in Leadership: Australian women, past and present (with Joy Damousi and Kim Rubenstein, ANU Press 2014).