She was the Postdoctoral Fellow in Jewish History at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, between 2018-2021, where she completed her manuscript on the internment of Jewish refugees in Colonial Cyprus at the end of the Second World War.
She has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and has also held fellowships at the Library of Congress’ Kluge Center in Washington D.C.
Eliana completed her DPhil in History at The University of Birmingham. In January 2022, she will begin her term as Alfred Landecker Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London.
How Britain’s network of colonial detention camps for Jewish refugees defined British responses to migration and minorities in the twentieth century
Throughout the twentieth century, Britain used its network of imperial holdings as sites of detention, not only for migrants and refugees, but for civilians and political insurgents. One of the largest cohorts to be interned across the Empire were European Jews. This project will offer the first comparative and interdisciplinary analysis of Jewish displacement in the British Empire. It seeks to critically reconfigure our understanding of the Holocaust beyond Central Europe, analysing this history through a global lens. In so doing, it will reveal the defining role the detention of Jewish refugees, both during and after the Holocaust, played in the transformation of contemporary responses to immigration. The project aims to uncover the neglected histories of detention sites for European Jewry in Africa, the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East by asking: How, and to what extent, did Britain’s network of colonial detention camps for Jewish refugees define British responses to migration and minorities in the twentieth century and beyond? The study will also analyse how the history of Jewish displacement before and after the Holocaust intersects with legacies of empire and decolonisation more broadly.