Refugee voices in modern global history: reckoning with refugeedom
Emeritus Professor Peter Gatrell (University of Manchester)
Wednesday, 10 June 2026, 5pm to 6pm
Seminar Room 1, Oxford Department of International Development, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TB
RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity Term 2026
Series convened by Associate Professor Catherine Briddick and Dr Uttara Shahani
About this talk
Peter Gatrell discusses the approach that he and fellow authors adopted in their book, Refugee Voices in Modern Global History: Reckoning with Refugeedom. After briefly highlighting some of their key findings, including a justification for the concept of 'refugeedom', Profesor Gatrell outlines his ongoing research which addresses UNHCR’s engagement with refugees in and beyond Europe in the years 1951 to 1975. This research draws on the extensive confidential individual case files held by UNHCR Records and Archives, Geneva.
Like his contribution to the book, this current project analyses the content and tone of letters that refugees wrote to UNHCR from different parts of the world and the responses they elicited. Professor Gatrell discusses the expectation that the refugees vouchsafe intimate details of their lives as a condition of being 'recognised' by UNHCR and thus eligible for its assistance and protection. But recognition was not a one-way process: refugees reflected on their relationship with its officials and sought to hold them to account.
Gatrell's approach is contextualised; deliberately reflexive; and interdisciplinary, being informed by classic and ongoing scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
About the speaker
Peter Gatrell is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Manchester where he taught, inter alia, Russian economic and social history, the cultural history of modern war, and refugee history. His latest book, co-authored with Katarzyna Nowak, Lauren Banko and Anindita Ghoshal, is Refugee Voices in Modern Global History (OUP, 2025). He is currently working on a book provisionally titled “Appointment in Geneva: Refugees’ Encounters with UNHCR, 1951-1975”, some of which is anticipated in articles in History Workshop Journal (2021; 2026 forthcoming, the latter co-authored with Giuliano Fleri).
Some of his previous books include: The Unsettling of Europe: the Great Migration, 1945 to the Present (Penguin, 2019); The Making of the Modern Refugee (OUP, 2013); Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956-1963 (CUP, 2011); and A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during the First World War (Indiana UP, 1999). He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. He now lives in Bradford-on-Avon.