Dr. Anastasia Felcher is a historian, cultural heritage scholar, and an archivist. Her main expertise is in the cultural history of borderlands in East-Central Europe, memory studies and minority histories.
Anastasia’s doctoral dissertation, defended with distinction at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca in 2016, focused on politics of Jewish heritage preservation and memory of the Holocaust in the newly independent states after the Cold War ended. Currently, she reworks the text into a forthcoming book, “Jewish Heritage in Transition. Memory, Representation and Reuse after the USSR Collapsed”, under consideration by the CEU Press.
Over the last eight years, Anastasia was awarded several research fellowships (at the Blinken OSA Archivum, German Historical Institute Moscow (DHI), Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Centre for Advanced Study Sofia, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI), and Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena) to work on Babyn Yar as a transnational memory site, Alexander Pushkin outside of Russia, and de-facto states in Eastern Europe. She also took part in projects with third-party funding (by Volkswagen Fondation, Swedish Research Foundation, and Horizon2020) and published in peer-review international journals and volumes.
Since 2020, Anastasia has served as the Archivist for the Slavic collection at the Blinken OSA Archivum at CEU in Budapest. There, she curates Slavic, Jewish and Samizdat archival collections, took part in public programs, authored media outreach, supervised assistant archivists and fellows, and prepared detailed overview of the Archivum’s Jewish collection for Yerusha: European Jewish Archives Portal. In 2025, she takes part in setting up a digital archive of the Russia’s war in Ukraine as a joint INDEX-IWM Archival Development Fellow at the newly launched INDEX Institute for Documentation and Exchange in Lviv.
In AY 2022-23 and 2023-24, Anastasia has been teaching at the Cultural Heritage Studies Program (CHSP) at CEU. In AY 2024-25, she teaches a Spring term course “Jewish Material Culture: Restitution, Reuse and Revitalization” (HISU5553) at the CEU’s Department of Historical Studies (HISU) in Vienna.