Understanding historical and political contexts to contemporary refugee movements.

Refugee History began as an initiative of the University of East Anglia, led by Lyndsey Stonebridge and Becky Taylor with institutional funding. As of summer 2020 the lead editor is Benjamin Thomas White at the University of Glasgow, with funding from the Research Council of Norway through its FRIHUMSAM projects Ref-Arab (286745, PI Maja Janmyr) and SuperCamp (288398, PI Are John Knudsen).

Refugee History is a site and interactive network for journalists, policy-makers, lawyers, NGOs, students, activists, academics, writers and artists and anyone interested in enriching and informing current debates about refugees with new research, insights and reports. It provides a platform for academic research, evidence from the field, professional expertise and personal experience relating to the broad issues of refugees and refugeedom.

Refugee History also operates as an online network through which members are able to share their perspectives on matters refugee, highlight new research, promote best practice, and develop new and collaborative research methods aimed at making an impact on current debates. Our members are some of the foremost thinkers and practitioners dealing with refugee issues today and come from many sectors, disciplines and parts of the world. Our directory is for public use and serves as a go-to guide of who to talk to about the many different facets of refugee and migration issues and scholarship.

If you are a journalist or work in policy or civil society and are looking for an expert to speak to about your work, research of challenges you face then please get in touch. We can put you in touch with our experts and share their research with you, all free of charge.

We have no political agenda, are entirely independent and no shared objectives connect us other than the desire to bring evidence, expertise and experience to current conversations around refugee and migration issues.

To get in touch about the project, make a submission or for media enquiries please contact info@refugeehistory.org or tweet us @RefugeeHistory.

Staff

Dr Anne Irfan, Co-Editor

Anne is a historian and Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Race, Gender and Postcolonial Studies at University College London. She is the author of Refuge and Resistance: Palestinians and the international refugee system (Columbia University Press, 2023) as well as several prize-winning articles on Palestinian displacement and refugee politics. She has also written for The Washington Post, The Nation and The Conversation. 

anne.irfan@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Anna Maguire, Co-Editor

Anna is a historian of migration, war and empire and Lecturer in Public History at University College London. Her research and public history practice is focuses on processes of ‘sanctuary’ as undertaken by refugee charities, organisations and activists in post-war Britain, and on co-productive arts-based approaches to history making.

anna.maguire@ucl.ac.uk

Dr Benjamin Thomas White, Co-Editor

Ben is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Glasgow. A Middle East historian by background, he now teaches and researches refugee history in the world at large. His research focuses on the history of the refugee camp, with recent side projects on the history of humanitarian evacuations and the relationship between humans and animals in displacement.

benjaminthomas.white@glasgow.ac.uk
@rain_later

Dr Laura Madokoro

Laura is a historian and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University, unceded Algonquin territory. She is the author of Elusive Refuge: Chinese Migrants in the Cold War (Harvard, 2016) and Sanctuary in Pieces: Two Hundred Years of Flight, Fugitivity and Resistance in a North American City (forthcoming) in addition to numerous articles on the history of settler colonialism, migration, race, and humanitarianism.

laura.madokoro@carleton.ca

Advisory Board

Providing strategic advice and oversight to our activities.

Jeff Crisp

Dr Jeff Crisp has held senior positions with UNHCR, where he was Head of Policy Development and Evaluation, as well as Refugees International (Senior Director for Policy and Advocacy) and the Global Commission on International Migration (Director of Policy and Research). He has also worked as an academic, journalist and in the NGO sector. Jeff has first-hand experience of refugee situations throughout the world and has published, lectured and broadcast extensively on humanitarian issues. He holds a Masters degree and PhD in African Studies and Political Science from the University of Birmingham. He is currently a Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, an Associate Fellow at Chatham House and Honorary Professor at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex.

Lisa Matthews

Lisa Matthews is a coordinator at Right to Remain, a national organisation that works with groups across the UK supporting people to establish their right to remain with dignity and humanity, and challenges injustice in the asylum and immigration system.  Lisa has worked at Right to Remain since 2011.  Her previous experience is in providing psycho-social support to refugees in Cairo, mental health community outreach with London's Somali and Bangladeshi communities, asylum and immigration legal casework, integration case management with refugees, and asylum advice.  She has a Masters Degree in War, History and Memory from the University of Manchester.

Daniel Trilling

Daniel Trilling is editor of New Humanist magazine and a journalist whose reporting and commentary on refugees in Europe has been published by the London Review of Books, Guardian and New Statesman among others. He is the author of Bloody Nasty People: the Rise of Britain's Far Right (Verso, 2012) and the forthcoming Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe (Picador, 2018).