Category: events

Dr. Ajnura Akbaš is a Research Coordinator at the War Childhood Museum, where she leads research and documentation projects focused on the lived experiences of individuals whose childhoods are affected by armed conflict. She is also a PhD graduate from the London School of Economics and Political Science, specialising in Gender studies. Her research examines women’s military service during the Bosnian war, with a focus on gender, militarisation, and post-war memory. Ajnura’s work is grounded in creative, trauma-sensitive and survivor-centred methodologies, including collage-making, body mapping, and collaborative documentary practices. She also supports the SCVN Yugoslav Wars Research Cluster as community liaison and primary contact with the War Childhood Museum, as well as developing an Archiving Toolkit specific to the Bosnian War. 

Dr. Matt Huculak is Director of the Kula: Library Futures Academy at the University of Victoria Libraries. A Library Journal “Mover and Shaker,” he was recognized for his work as a digital scholarship innovator during his tenure as Head of Advanced Research Services at UVic Libraries, where he led initiatives in digital asset management, grant-supported scholarship, and digital exhibitions connecting faculty, students, and communities. His research and leadership focus on transdisciplinary knowledge creation, positioning libraries as incubators for emerging technologies and collaborative inquiry across disciplines. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Tulsa and an MLIS from San Jose State University, with graduate study at McGill University and UC Davis — a formation that reflects his grounding in both the humanities and information science. He also serves as Data Director for the Survivor-Centred Visual Narratives (SCVN) project, overseeing the development of the project’s archival infrastructure.

Olivia Kozlovic is an MA student in the Holocaust Studies stream in the University of Victoria’s Germanic and Slavic Studies department. Her research examines the entangled memories of the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Wars in the Balkans, focusing on sites of memory as physical manifestations of this entangled memory in Croatia, Serbia, and Bosnia. Her aim is to understand how the memories of these two events impact one another in the public memory landscape of the Yugoslav successor states. She is supporting the SCVN project as a research assistant archiving the artistic materials, beginning with the Holocaust and Yugoslav Wars Research Clusters.

Franziska Zaugg is a lecturer at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Fribourg. From 2018 to 2022 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bern, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation/Ambizione. From 2015 to 2018, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at University College Dublin, Centre for War Studies, and from 2016 to 2018, she worked as an early career researcher in the “Transnational Resistance Project” at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on conflict and war history, resistance and collaboration movements, youth cultures, and the dialectal relationship between archives and society. Franziska Zaugg is a co-founder of the working group “History-Society-Violence” (Geschichte-Gesellschaft-Gewalt). She is also the SCVN Yugoslav Wars Research Cluster Co-Lead, working with a survivor who is a Roma woman, sharing her life experiences in Serbia in the 1990s where the discrimination and violence of the Yugoslav Wars shaped her childhood and youth. 

Nathaniel Brunt is a Canadian interdisciplinary scholar, documentarian, and educator whose work critically examines modern armed conflict and the ways it is, and has been, represented photographically. Trained as a cultural historian and documentary photographer, he studies how individuals, institutions, and communities interpret their worlds visually during wartime. He completed his PhD in the Communication and Culture joint program at Toronto Metropolitan University and York University, supported by SSHRC and the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. Brunt’s photographic work has been widely published and exhibited internationally. He is currently undertaking long-term documentary projects in Northern Iraq and Kashmir, is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria Libraries, and will be a Hannah Arendt Fellow in 2026. He joined the SCVN project in 2025 as a Research Advisor and will share his experience archiving in Iraq to support the Yezidi project archives. 

Kjell Anderson is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Manitoba, specializing in genocide, perpetrator studies, international criminal law, and transitional justice. He is the author of Perpetrating Genocide: A Criminological Account (2017) and co-editor of Researching Perpetrators of Genocide (2020). His fieldwork spans Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Bosnia, Cambodia, Bangladesh, and northern Iraq, where he has investigated atrocity crimes, victim experiences, and perpetrator narratives. He has held academic positions at the University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, the University of the Fraser Valley, and the National University of Rwanda, and worked with NGOs, think tanks, and international organizations. His current projects include books on Dominic Ongwen, the Rohingya genocide, and epistemic justice and transitional justice. He is also the SCVN Iraq/Syria Research Cluster Co-Lead working with a Yezidi survivor, ‘Jilan’ (not her real name) and graphic artist Birgit Weyhe to develop a graphic novel about Jilan’s experiences during the Yezidi Genocide. His interdisciplinary research integrates legal, criminological, and social science approaches to mass violence and post-conflict accountability.