In an office in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, approximately 20,000 handwritten testimonies from Bosnian concentration camp survivors sit in plastic folders, filling bookcase after bookcase, exposed to a leaking roof.
Written within hours of survivors’ release from captivity during the 1992-95 war, these accounts are among the most immediate and unmediated records of atrocity in existence in Bosnia.
Yet they have never been examined by scholars or the media, catalogued, or digitised.
A voice for survivors
Dr Tiania Stevens, a lecturer at the University of Sydney, has been working with a community of survivors for over a decade. Under a Humanities Travelling Fellowship, awarded by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, she’ll travel to Sarajevo to coordinate the examination and digitisation of the records, in collaboration with a local not-for-profit concentration camp organisation, Savez Logoraša u BiH, the custodians of the testimonies.
She says the urgency of this project grows each year as aging camp survivors pass away, and the documents become more delicate.
“This Fellowship will allow me to preserve, digitise, and make globally accessible a critically endangered archive. The digitisation of these documents will transform fragile pages into a searchable digital resource that researchers, educators, policymakers, and survivor communities will be able to access,” said Dr Stevens.
Many of the testimonies document daily life in the camps, patterns of abuse, and chains of command.
In addition to digitising the archive of testimonials, Dr Stevens plans to conduct oral interviews with camp survivors, reflecting on their experiences nearly thirty five years after their release.
“I want to ensure we capture survivors’ stories, in their own voices, before they are lost,” Dr Stevens told the Academy. “I’m also interested in gathering primary data on how survivors have narrated and revised their memories across more than three decades since their release from incarceration.”
From journalism to academia
Before obtaining her PhD, Dr Stevens was a defence journalist, reporting from conflict zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. Leaving journalism, Dr Stevens obtained a Master’s degree in War Studies from King’s College, University of London, before returning home to complete her PhD at the University of Queensland.
Her current research builds on her doctoral studies, which examined the contemporary lives and testimonies of Bosnian Muslim male survivors of concentration camps established during the Bosnian War of the 1990s.
“Being awarded a travelling fellowship will support the next significant stage of research. The archive in Sarajevo cannot be accessed remotely, and the digitisation must be undertaken on site in close collaboration with Savez Logoraša u BiH.”
Dr Stevens says her background as a defence journalist informs her scholarly work, shaping her focus on humanitarian journalism and memory in preserving and sharing Bosnian camp survivors’ stories.
“The historical denial of the Bosnian genocide makes their preservation politically as well as scholarly urgent,” she says.
“Working at the intersection of humanitarian journalism, memory studies, and digital heritage preservation, this research brings to scholarly attention an archive that applies the fundamental principles of the ‘humanitarian’ form of journalism as both a methodological framework and an ethical lens for archival and other scholarly work.”
The project will produce a fully digitised, searchable online archive. Further outputs will include a scholarly monograph and various journal articles arising from the research.
Dr Stevens will travel to Sarajevo from August to September 2026.
“This Fellowship will allow me to do work that matters not only to scholarship but to the people whose voices this archive holds.”
