In 2023, Mahshid Mayar published the insightful article “‘Playes Print the Letter’: American Child(hoods) as Archival Present/ce” in the Journal for the History of Childhood and Youth. In it, she expl...

Volume 53, Issue 5 of The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History

Emigration, Settlement, Community Building and Integration

Join Mitacs Globalink Research Internship for Students. Expand your academic horizons with international research experiences.

Manchester University Press is known globally as a publisher of Humanities and Social Sciences research. We currently publish over 170 books each year, as well as seven journals.

"Forced Migration: Exiles and Refugees in the UK and the British Empire, 1815–1949" published on 24 Mar 2025 by Brill.

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We’re here to create and harness knowledge, to deliver opportunity for everyone.About the RoleAs Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in American History, you will be required to make a significant contributio...

On 2 July 2025, the Royal Historical Society hosted its annual Prothero Lecture, given this year by Professor Peter Gatrell FBA on the subject of ‘Refugee World(s): a Twentieth-Century Retrospective’. Peter’s lecture drew on his recent research in the archives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. The archive contains the letters and petitions that refugees sent to the UNHCR in the post-1945 era, and provides the historian with rare insights of how refugees presented their situation and the responses they received. The numerous case files preserved by the UNHCR disclose the hopes, aspirations and rights claims of displaced people from many different parts of the world, whether or not they were recognised under international refugee law. As Peter argued in this lecture, to consider refugees’ encounters with refugee-creating, refugee-hosting, and refugee-deterring states – and with the organisations charged with their protection and assistance – offers new approaches to refugee history and the writing of refugees into modern global history. Peter Gatrell FBA is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Manchester. His recent publications include: 'The Unsettling of Europe: the Great Migration, 1945 to the Present' (2019) and the co-authored 'Refugee Voices in Modern Global History: Reckoning with Refugeedom' (2025), which draws on the rich resources of the UNHCR archives to present the personal experiences of mass displacement. Established in 1969, Royal Historical Society’s Prothero Lecture – which is named for the historian and former RHS President, George W. Prothero (1848-1924) – has been given annually since that date. Those invited to give the lecture are leading historians whose research has shaped how we think about the past.

Abstract. Across modern history, refugees have articulated their experiences and wishes against the backdrop of mass displacement brought about by world wa