Research Affiliate

Dr. Anna Sheftel, Principal and Associate Professor, School of Community and Public Affairs, Concordia University

Dr. Anna Sheftel is Principal and Associate Professor in the School of Community and Public Affairs at Concordia. Shehas a DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford. Prior to coming to Concordia, she was an Associate Professor of Conflict Studies at Saint Paul University in Ottawa, and Vice-Dean of the Faculties of Human Sciences and Philosophy. Her field of expertise is oral history of genocide and atrocity, and she has done research projects on wartime memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the public testimonial practices of Holocaust survivors in Montrealm, Holocaust survivors who experienced sustained socioeconomic inequality, and was a co-applicant on a SSHRC Partnership-Engage Grant to develop a collaborative audio tour about Holocaust survivors’ immigration to Montreal. This audio tour, Refugee Boulevard: Making Montreal Home After the Holocaust, won both the 2020 Oral History Association (OHA) and Canadian Historical Association (CHA) Digital and Public History prizes. She has also published extensively on oral history practice, ethics and pedagogy. Some notable examples include Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), co-edited with Stacey Zembrzycki, which won the OHA’s 2014 Book Award, and her article, “Talking and Not Talking about Violence: Challenges in Interviewing Survivors of Atrocity as Whole People,” won the OHA’s 2019 Article Award. Currently, she is continuing her work with Holocaust survivors in Montreal, as well as examining the legacies of student activism in Quebec.