Volha Bartash, Ph.D.

Volha Bartash is a historian and ethnologist specialising in the history and culture of Roma and Sinti, the legacies of the Nazi genocide, and memory and heritage in Eastern and East-Central Europe. She studied History and Ethnology at Belarusian State University in Minsk. In 2010, she defended her doctoral dissertation at the K. Krapiva Institute of Arts, Ethnography and Folklore of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus and was awarded her degree in 2011. Her doctoral research focused on Romani culture and social organisation in Belarus and their transformation following the Soviet sedentarization campaign.

She has held fellowships at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute, and the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, and was a visiting researcher at Uppsala University. From 2018 to 2021, she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at the IOS, where she conducted the ROMPAST project on the memory and representation of the Nazi genocide of Roma in Belarus and Lithuania. She subsequently held research and teaching positions at the Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies and the University of Münster. In 2025, she co-founded the international research network “Margins of Memory: Cultures and Politics of Non-Hegemonic Remembrance” supported by the Leibniz ScienceCampus.

Since June 2026, she has been a Senior Researcher at the IOS, where she leads the ERC Consolidator Grant project “EMPOWER: Empowering Legacy: Sites of Romani Genocide and Community Commemoration in East and East-Central Europe.”