Expertise:

oral history, immigration, Holocaust, genocide, refugees, community history

Language(s) spoken:

English, French (able to conduct interviews in French)

Dr. Anna Sheftel has a DPhil in Modern History and an MSc in Forced Migration from the University of Oxford. She did her BA at Concordia in Linguistics. Prior to her appointment at Concordia, she was an Associate Professor of Conflict Studies and Vice-Dean of the Faculties of Human Sciences and Philosophy at Saint Paul University in Ottawa. Her fields of expertise are oral history of genocide, atrocity, migration and activism, as well as oral ethics and practice. She has done research projects on wartime memory in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the public testimonial practices of Holocaust survivors in Montreal, Holocaust survivors who experienced sustained socioeconomic inequality in Canada, and the migration experience of survivors after World War II. She also co-developped  a collaborative audio tour, Refugee Boulevard: Making Montreal Home After the Holocaust, which 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 methodology, ethics and pedagogy, with a focus on collaborative and community-engaged practices and listening to difficult stories. She is internationally recognized for these publications, most notably for 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 for her article, “Talking and Not Talking about Violence: Challenges in Interviewing Survivors of Atrocity as Whole People,” which won the OHA’s 2019 Article Award. She is active in her professional association and in her community, and she currently serves as the co-chair of OHA's Advocacy Committee. 

Currently, Dr. Sheftel is working on several projects, including: an oral history of the 2012 Québec student strike; a SSHRC-funded project about Back River cemetery as a site of memory and intercultural encounter; and a SSHRC-funded project examining the evolution of Holocaust commemoration institutions from the perspectives of Holocaust survivors themselves.

Visit this expert's Faculty Profile