Practical information
This event is open to all, but registration is required. Lunch will be served from 12.45, and we kindly request that you specify any dietary restrictions in the online form. The presentation will begin at 13.00.
The event is held at HF-12 Selskapslokalet in Niels Treschows hus in Blindern.
About the seminar
Peter and Kasia, together with Lauren Banko and Anindita Ghoshal, are co-authors of Refugee Voices in Modern Global History, published by Oxford University Press in spring 2025. The book builds on the externally funded research that they undertook at the University of Manchester.
The book places refugees at the centre of modern history and demonstrates how ordinary refugees understood their experiences and engaged with institutions that sought to resolve their predicament. Drawing on archives across three continents, it shows how refugees exercised agency, engaged with institutions, and navigated the complex politics of the refugee regime.
During the seminar, Peter and Kasia will briefly outline their collaboration, justify their approach, including their use of the term "refugeedom", and highlight some substantive findings in the light of their research and that of other scholars in the field of refugee history and refugee studies. They will also tell us about their new lines of research and how they make use of the Vatican Apostolic Archive (Kasia) and the confidential individual case files held by UNHCR Records and Archives (Peter).
About the speakers
Peter Gatrell is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Manchester where he taught for 45 years before retiring in 2021. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His latest book, The Unsettling of Europe: The Great Migration 1945 to the Present, appeared with Penguin Books and Basic Books in 2019. He previously wrote several books in refugee history and Russian history. More recently he co-authored Refugee Voices in Modern Global History (Oxford University Press, 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). He is an active participant in the annual international seminar in historical refugee studies. He lives in Bradford-on-Avon.
Katarzyna Nowak is a historian specializing in the cultural and social history of the early Cold War, with a particular interest in refugee history. During her doctoral and postdoctoral research at the University of Manchester, the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, and Central European University, she focused on Displaced Persons from Eastern Europe in a global perspective. Her first monograph, entitled "Kingdom of Barracks: Polish Displaced Persons in Allied-Occupied Germany and Austria", was published with McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2023.
Currently, she is a Marie Curie fellow at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. Her project focuses on the Vatican's involvement in refugee aid in the post-World War II period, drawing on sources from the newly declassified Vatican archives.
Organizer
This event is co-hosted by the BEYOND project at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law and the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo.