2022 Keynote
Delphine Diaz: Women and Children in Exile in and from France, 1830-1939
Video of the lecture will follow soon
The figure of the refugee has long been perceived as a man headed into solitary exile. However, if we re-examine the case of France as a land of departure and of asylum, other protagonists of forced migrations come into view, namely women and children, often treated as a single entity by the authorities. Starting in the 1830s and going through to the eve of the Second World War, this paper complicates the typical portrait of the refugee, shedding light on the place and increasing role played by women and children in exile, in France and in Europe.
Delphine Diaz is Associate Professor of History at the Université de Reims since 2014 and a research fellow of the Institut universitaire de France since 2020. Prior to joining she received her PhD from the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2012. Her first book, Un asile pour tous les peuples ? Exilés et réfugiés étrangers en France au cours du premier xixe siècle, won the Augustin Thierry Prize for history. Between 2016 and 2020, she coordinated the AsileuropeXIX research program, “Towards a European history of exile and asylum during the 19th century,” funded by the Agence nationale de la recherche. She is the author of a book on the history of the refugees in Europe, En exil. Les réfugiés en Europe de la fin du xviiie siècle à nos jours (Gallimard, 2021).
2021 Keynote
Peter Gatrell: Learning by Doing – Reflections on Refugee History
In his presentation, Peter Gatrell discusses some of the conceptual and methodological issues which he encountered in writing refugee history, and how he has attempted to deal with them. He connects these semi-autobiographical reflections with a discussion about what is at stake when refugees and institutional actors in the refugee regime „learn by doing“. These remarks are informed by his current research, which makes use of the extensive individual case files created by UNHCR between 1951 and 1975.
Peter Gatrell recently retired from the University of Manchester. In addition to books on Russian economic and social history, his publications include a trilogy on refugee history: A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War 1 (1999); Free World? The Campaign to Save the World’s Refugees, 1956-1963 (2011); and The Making of the Modern Refugee (2013). His latest book, The Unsettling of Europe: the Great Migration, 1945 to the Present (2019), was awarded the Laura Shannon Prize and Italy’s “Premio Cherasco”. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Academy of Social Sciences. He led the AHRC-funded research project, “Reckoning with refugeedom: refugee voices in modern history, 1919-1975” and he is currently researching individual case files in UNHCR Records and Archives for the period 1951-75.