Collegium Carolinum,
the German Historical Institute Warsaw,
and the Leibniz-Institute for History and Culture in Eastern Europe
in collaboration with the Ústav historie FF UK,
the Institut für Zeitgeschichte der Universität Innsbruck,
and the Filozofická fakulta Univerzita Karlova
cordially invite you to the lecture
PROF. PETER GATRELL (MANCHESTER)
DR. KATARZYNA NOWAK (VIENNA)
Refugee Voices Across and Beyond the Archive
This event is part of the workshop “Archives of Migration”.
Monday, December 1 2025, 7.15 p.m.
Filozofická fakulta UK, nám. J. Palacha 2, Praha 1, místnost P301
The lecture will be streamed via Zoom as well, please contact
florian.ruttner@collegium-carolinum.de
In this lecture we discuss letters and petitions written by refugees from different backgrounds and different contexts, and addressed to a variety of governmental, non-governmental and inter-governmental institutions. Our analysis of these extensive sources is presented in our co-authored book, Refugee Voices in Modern Global History (2025). Besides highlighting our key conclusions about population displacement in the modern era, including the concept of refugeedom, we shall discuss issues around archival access and the ethics of researching refugee history. Finally, we shall consider the challenges of dealing with gaps and silences in the archival record and how these might be addressed.
The talk is also part of the workshop “Archives of Migration” organized by the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) and will be organized in collaboration with the Institute of History at the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University.
---
Peter Gatrell is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Manchester where he taught economic and social history, the cultural history of war and refugee history. He is the author of The Unsettling of Europe: the Great Migration, 1945 to the Present (2019), and is preparing a book on refugees and the UNHCR. He was a founding member of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute and is a Fellow of the British Academy, of the Academy of Social Sciences, and of the Royal Historical Society.
Katarzyna Nowak is a historian specialising in the cultural and social history of the early Cold War and the author of Kingdom of Barracks: Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria. She is currently working on her book project on refugees and the Holy See as a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Vienna.