Ms. Lena Clara Christoph

Professional Background

Lena Christoph is a doctoral researcher at the Department for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna, working within the ERC-funded project “GLORE – Global Resettlement Regimes: Ambivalent Lessons Learned from the Postwar (1945-1951).” Prior to her doctoral studies, Ms. Christoph earned master's degrees from the University of Vienna, including an exchange at Monash University, Melbourne. Her master’s thesis, “Anti-Imperialist Solidarity in the International War Crimes Tribunal on Vietnam,” examined the Russell Tribunal (1967) as an example of international solidarity activism against the war in Vietnam, and received the Vienna Global History scholarship.

In 2024, Ms. Christoph was a doctoral research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and in early 2025, she was affiliated with Monash University during a two-month research stay in Australia.

Fellowship Research

Lena Christoph was awarded the Leon and Edith Milman Fellowship for her research project “Between Exile and Resettlement: Transnational Journeys of Jewish and ‘White’ Russian Refugees through the Philippines (1945–1953)." Her dissertation examines displaced persons who found refuge in and transited through the Philippines within the broader context of the post-World War II refugee regime. It focuses on two key groups: approximately 1,300 Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi Europe before the Pacific War, and a group of around 5,500 “White” Orthodox Russians who had escaped Communism in Russia and later in China.

The project traces refugees’ trajectories and examines how they navigated postwar displacement, restrictions, and resettlement, focusing on the refugee regime in Asia from a global history perspective. By analysing the interactions between different actors, state authorities, welfare officers, refugee elites and the DPs themselves, the research investigates to what extent DPs were caught between various powerful players and how they were able to exert agency in shaping their futures.

This fellowship allows Ms. Christoph to utilize the Museum’s archival collections to retrieve stories of European Jewish survivors who were resettled from the Philippines to the United States. She plans to examine holdings from the Manila Jewish community, personal collections, oral history interviews, and records of other involved organizations, such as the World Jewish Congress, the Red Cross, or Far Eastern Jewish Central Information Bureau.

Residency Period: June 1, 2025 – July 30, 2025