Anastasia Felcher

Dr. Anastasia Felcher is a historian, cultural heritage specialist, and an archivist. She has expertise and particular interest in the cultural history of borderlands in East-Central Europe, memory studies and minority histories.

Anastasia’s doctoral dissertation (defended at IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, 2016) focused on politics of Jewish heritage preservation and memory of the Holocaust in the newly independent states after 1989/91. She also researched post-Soviet de-facto regimes, memorializing Alexander Pushkin outside Russia, and heritage discourses in East-Central Europe. She has received numerous research fellowships (including at the Blinken OSA, DHI Moscow, GWZO, CAS Sofia et al.) and participated in several projects with third-party funding (including Volkswagen Fondation, Swedish Research Foundation, and Horizon2020). During her most recent research fellowship (2022-23) at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI), Anastasia researched Soviet Jewish samizdat as memory media and worked on her forthcoming book "Jewish Heritage in Transition. Memory, Preservation and Representation after 1989/91".

Before joining the Blinken OSA, Anastasia worked as a country expert for data identification for the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, EHRI (2018-19). Since 2020, she has served as the Archivist for the Slavic collection at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives at the Central European University in Budapest. At the Blinken OSA, Anastasia curated Slavic, Jewish and Samizdat archival collections. She arranged, described, and enhanced metadata for the online archival catalog and external databases. She also ensured the general and targeted promotion of the collection, took part in public programs and teaching activities at the archives, authored blog posts based on the collection, supervised assistant archivists and the Visegrad Scholarship holders. Since 2023, Anastasia has taught part-time at the Cultural Heritage Studies Program (CHSP) at CEU in Vienna.

Starting from mid-November 2023, Anastasia is on maternity leave. She can be reached via felchera@ceu.edu.

Khrushchev in Hungary: How Isolated Eastern Leaders Reinforced Each Other

“Toward a World Without Weapons and Violence” – Mikhail Gorbachev Died 1 Year Ago

Toward a Nuclear Archive: from Peaceful Atom to the Long Shadow of Chernobyl

Afterlives of the Murdered Poets – Radio Liberty on the Fate of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee

“The Sakharov Case” and Western Communist Parties

A “Sudden Transition“: Images of Independent Ukraine

A “Sudden Transition“: Images of Sovereign Ukraine

Soviet Dead End: Solving the Wallenberg Mystery in the Cold War

A Massacre under Khrushchev: Novocherkassk Shooting on Screen, on Air, and on Banners

What Do Archives Reveal about the Birth of Democracy in Russia?