Roni Mikel-Arieli is a cultural historian, interested in the intersections between Holocaust memory, contemporary Jewish history, and African Studies. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow and a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. For the past two years, Mikel-Arieli also served as the academic director of the oral history division at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and she is one of the founders of the Forum for Wartime Documentary Initiatives.
Mikel-Arieli was awarded a 2020-2021 research fellowship at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem; 2019-2020 Phyllis Greenberg Heideman and Richard D. Heideman fellowship at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, USHMM; and a 2019 Junior Postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich. Her first authored book, titled Remembering the Holocaust in a Racial State: Holocaust Memory in South Africa from Apartheid to Democracy (1948-1994) was published in 2022 in De Gruyter series “New Perspectives on Modern Jewish History.” Her articles have appeared in the journals: Journal of Genocide Research, African Identities, Journal of Jewish Identities, South African Historical Journal, The Communication Review, and Jewish Social Studies, and she is the Modern Books Section Editor of the Jewish Historical Studies: A Journal of English-Speaking Jewry. She is currently finishing a book for Brill titled The Holocaust and Sub-Saharan Africa: A Documentary History, co-authored with Shirli Gilbert (UCL).