EAJS Grants Assistant
Željka Oparnica is a Jewish History Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She completed her PhD in History at Birkbeck, University of London in 2022. Her thesis examined politics of Sephardi diaspora in the Balkans in the first half of the twentieth century in the context of broader European and Mediterranean trends of Jewish politics of the time. She was a Leo Baeck Fellow in 2019/2020. She has published on the changing role of Judeo-Spanish for modern Sephardi politics and Sephardi cultural politics. Her current project examines Jewish politics with other minority politics between Trieste and Dubrovnik. In the coming 2023/2024 she will be Rome Fellow at the British School at Rome.
In 2018 Željka participated at the EAJS congress in Krakow on the Southeast European panels which was her first academic conference as a PhD student and scholar. It certainly affected the turn her research and interest developed and she is interested in furthering regional Jewish history network. Together with Dr. Noëmie Duhaut, she co-organised the Southeast European panels in 2023 EAJS congress in Frankfurt and is enthusiastic about furthering transregional connections within the European Jewish studies framework.
In 2023, Željka joined the EAJS as its new Grants Assistant. Her role will be to to assist with the administration of the EAJS’s Conference Grant Programme and Small Research Grant Programme.