Directory of Experts — Refugee History.

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Katherine Mackinnon is a research assistant at Glasgow University working on a project on humans and animals in refugee camps. She also manages volunteering projects at Refugee Survival Trust. Her research interests include oral history, the intersection of public space and political engagement, and the geography of recipes.

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Alyssa Girvan

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Alyssa Girvan has a BA in Film and History and is currently studying a MA in Media and International Development at the University of East Anglia. Her research interests are documentary filmmaking and theory. She has also made some short films, including ‘Near and Far’ for the Norfolk Congolese Association in 2016.

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Rachel Pistol

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Rachel Pistol is a Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on Second World War internment in the UK and USA, immigration and refugee history, historical memory, the commemoration and the preservation of historical sites. She has appeared on the BBC and Sky News, and has articles in The Independent, Newsweek, and The Huffington Post. Her book Internment during the Second World War: A Comparative Study of Great Britain and the USA is published by Bloomsbury. She completed her BA, MA, and doctorate at Royal Holloway, University of London, under the supervision of Professor David Cesarani OBE.

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Kieran Taylor

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Kieran Taylor is a history teacher and doctoral candidate at the University of Stirling. His research examines Glasgow Corporation’s response to Belgian Refugees. He is interested in the history of minority communities within Britain during the late 19th and 20th centuries and is funded by Glasgow Life.

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Rebekah Klein-Pejšová

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Rebekah Klein-Pejšová is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Human Rights Program at Purdue University. She is the author of Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), and recent contributions on Jewish refugees during World War One and the post-World War Two era.

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Elisa Sandri

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Elisa Sandri is an independent researcher interested in migration, refugees and the role of volunteers in the European ‘refugee crisis’. She obtained a Master’s degree in Anthropology of Development from the University of Sussex in 2016. She worked as a researcher for the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Mekong Migration Network, DFID and WFP. She volunteered in Calais between 2015 and 2016, providing humanitarian aid to refugees in the unofficial ‘Jungle’ camp. She is also a trustee of the Hummingbird Refugee Project, a charity working with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in the UK.

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Tess Berry-Hart

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Tess Berry-Hart is an author and playwright who helped establish grassroots refugee charity Calais Action in the summer of 2015, shipping containers of aid to Calais, Dunkirk, Samos and Athens. She also helps run a choir of refugees and asylum seekers in London called The Citizens of the World Choir. Her play “Cargo”, set in a shipping container and following refugees crossing a border, is inspired by her experiences meeting child refugees in camps across Europe. Tess has also spoken at the UNHCR in Geneva and the humanitarian convention ALNAP in Stockholm from a volunteer perspective. She is part of a refugee task force in the House of Lords and campaigns for refugee rights in Parliament with Safe Passage. Tess often appears as commentator on refugee issues on the BBC, ITV, radio and various independent documentaries such as the recent award-winning documentary Calais Children.

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Maja Janmyr

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Maja Janmyr is Professor of International Migration Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. Her research interests are broadly in the fields of international migration law and socio-legal approaches to international law, with a particular focus on the Middle East. Janmyr holds a PhD in International Law from the University of Bergen in Norway, and is also an affiliated scholar at the American University of Beirut. Janmyr has published widely on a range of refugee law issues, including the book Protecting Civilians in Refugee Camps: Unwilling and Unable States, UNHCR and International Responsibility (Brill, 2014).

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Arabella Dorman

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Arabella Dorman is an internationally renowned war artist and one of Britain’s leading portrait painters. Arabella’s war art explores the realities of conflict today, its immediate impacts and long-term consequences. Arabella has worked as an officially accredited war artist in Iraq and Afghanistan for over a decade, and more recently with refugees in Lesvos, Palestine, Calais, Lebanon and Syria. Arabella enjoys a prominent reputation as a public speaker and fundraiser. She was listed as one of BBC’s Top 100 Women in 2014, and Salt Magazine’s 100 Most Inspiring Women in 2015. Her work has been profiled across national and international television, radio and print, including New York Times, BBC, CNN, Aljizeera, Radio 4, BBC World Service, and featured on the front cover of The Times, The Guardian and The Sunday Times Magazine. Arabella’s installations Suspended (St James’s Church Piccadilly, Canterbury Cathedral, 2017/18) and Flight (St James’s Church Piccadilly, 2015/16), have been internationally acclaimed in raising global awareness about what she considers to be one of the defining issues of our times, the forced displacement of people today. Suspended will be installed in Leicester cathedral, 20 June – 28 August 2018

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Marta Welander

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Marta Welander is the executive director of the non-governmental human rights organisation Refugee Rights Europe. Under her leadership, the organisation has conducted extensive field research in refugee camps and settlements across Europe, interviewing and surveying more than 4,000 refugees and displaced people since February 2016. She is a PhD candidate and visiting lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at University of Westminster, where she researches European border violence in the context of the contemporary 'refugee crisis'. Marta holds an MA in Human Rights & Democratic Governance from the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights (EIUC), and an MA in International Relations from King’s College London. Prior to that, she obtained a BA (Hons) in International Relations and Arabic from the University of Westminster.

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Robert Carr

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Robert Carr, Ph.D. (2012) is an adjunct research fellow in the Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University, Australia. He has published and lectured in political science, history and human security studies.

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Katy Budge

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Emily Crowley

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Emily is the Deputy Director of STAR (Student Action for Refugees) she joined the charity in October 2009. Emily leads on managing the student network and volunteering at STAR, this includes working with local organisations to set up and support STAR volunteer projects, training volunteers and providing advice and support to STAR groups with their volunteering. She has been working with refugees since 2006 and before STAR worked at Mind researching access to mental health services for refugees and asylum seekers in England and Wales and before that as Volunteer Coordinator at the North Glasgow Community Food Initiative, which started out as a Glasgow STAR project. She also teaches English to refugees and migrants in a voluntary capacity.

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Rumana Hashem

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Rumana is an activist-educator and a sociologist with specialisation in conflict, gender, migration, sexual violence, and peace studies. She is an academic tutor in OLIve at UEL and a Coordinator of the IASFM’s Working Group on Archiving and Documentation of History of Forced- Migration and Refugees. https://www.uel.ac.uk/staff/h/rumana-hashem

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Koen Leurs

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Koen Leurs is an assistant professor in Gender and Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He works on digital migration studies, and he is the principal investigator of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research-funded study “Young Connected Migrants. Comparing Digital Practices of Young Asylum Seekers and Expatriates in the Netherlands,” and the Dutch National Research Agenda funded participatory action research project “Media literacy through Making Media: A Key to Participation for Young Newcomers.” He is the chair of the European Communication Research and Education (ECREA) Diaspora, Migration and the Media section. Recently he guest-edited a special issue on “Connected migrants: Encapsulation and cosmopolitaniza- tion” for Popular Communication. International Journal of Media and Culture (volume 16.1, 2018). Currently, he is co-editing the Sage Handbook of Media and Migration.

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Kevin Smets

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Kevin Smets is assistant professor in media and culture at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Brussels, Belgium), where he teaches on media and cultural theory, visual culture and film studies. His research focuses on relations between media, conflict, and migration, particularly in the Middle East and diasporic com- munities. He obtained his PhD from the University of Antwerp (Belgium) in 2013 and has been a visiting researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin, the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London), and Bilgi University (Istanbul). He is vice-chair of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) Diaspora, Migration and the Media section, and currently co-edits the SAGE Handbook of Media and Migration. In 2017, he was selected as a member of the Jonge Academie, part of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts.

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Jordanna Bailkin

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Jordanna Bailkin is Professor of History and Jere L. Bacharach Endowed Professor of International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of three books: most recently, Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain (Oxford, 2018). Currently, she is researching a new project on the transnational history of private security and immigration detention.

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Samantha K Knapton

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Samantha K Knapton is a PhD candidate at Newcastle University, UK. Her research examines the experiences of Polish Displaced Persons in the British zone of occupation in Germany between 1945 and 1951. She focuses on how British policies emanating from various sources all attributed to the formation of an isolated and disjointed community in Germany.

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Alice Lucas

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Alice Lucas is Programme Manager for the non-governmental human rights organisation Refugee Rights Europe, leading on the organisations evidence-based advocacy work on human rights for refugees and displaced people in Europe. Prior to joining Refugee Rights Europe Alice worked in the education and communications sector, alongside voluntary roles in refugee support. She is also currently a constituency caseworker, advising on a diverse range of issues. Alice holds an MSc in International Public Policy from the University College London and a BA in English Literature from the University of Westminster.

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Charlotte Gallagher

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Charlotte Gallagher is the Programme Officer for Refugee Rights Europe, a non-governmental human rights organisation advocating for the rights of refugees and displaced people in Europe. Charlotte is currently studying for an LLM in Human Rights Law and Practice at the University of York, where her research focuses on human rights obligations concerning immigration detention practices in Europe. Prior to this, Charlotte volunteered in European refugee camps, later moving to London to support asylum seekers with a range of health, legal and housing issues. Charlotte completed her BA in Modern History at the University of East Anglia in 2015.

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Rhys Crilley

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Dr Rhys Crilley is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Global Media and Communication at The Open University, UK, where he works on the AHRC-funded ‘Reframing Russia’ project. His research explores the intersections of social media and global politics with a specific interest in war and legitimacy. Rhys has published several journal articles and he is currently working on writing his first monograph on the legitimation of war on social media. He tweets at @rhyscrilley.

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Anne Gerhard

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Anne Gerhard recently completed her MLitt in Dress and Textile Histories at the University of Glasgow, UK. Her research examines the reception of Kindertransport dress upon arrival in Great Britain. She examines influences on Kinder dress and the ways in which dress helped or hindered Kinder assimilation.

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Lisa Matthews

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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.
Lisa is an advisory board member for Refugee History.

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Ria Sunga

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Ria Sunga is a PhD student at the University of Manchester, researching the history of refugee policy and assistance in the Philippines. Her thesis focuses on Jews, White Russians and Indochinese refugees and asylum-seekers, and the various actors that were involved in their asylum (state, international refugee regime, and various non-state actors).

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Baher Ibrahim

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Baher Ibrahim is a PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow. He is studying the history of psychiatry in refugee camps, and how refugee camps function as sites for the generation and accumulation of psychiatric knowledge. More broadly, his PhD looks at the history of the field of refugee mental health, as theorized and researched by academics and psychiatrists, and as delivered in humanitarian settings. A physician by training, he has been involved in public mental health research at the Cairo office of Medecins du Monde and curriculum design for a Leadership in Mental Health course at the Mental Health Unit of the Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office of the World Health Organization. Baher has a MA in community psychology from the American University in Cairo, where his thesis was part of a larger project to train urban Sudanese refugees in Cairo to provide lay counselling to peers in their community who have suffered trauma. He also has a MSc in global mental health from King’s College London and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

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Huw Halstead

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Dr Huw Halstead is a Research Fellow in the School of History at the University of St Andrews. He works on displacement, memory, everyday life, and public history, with a particular focus on the history of Mediterranean Europe and former Ottoman territories.

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Fiona Barclay

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Dr Fiona Barclay is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at the University of Stirling and Leadership Fellow on the two-year AHRC research project ‘Narratives and Representations of the French Settlers of Algeria’. Her work examines the postcolonial relationship between Algeria and France, with a particular focus on the European pied-noir settler community. She is the author of Writing Postcolonial France: Haunting, Literature and the Maghreb (Lexington, 2011), and editor of France's Colonial Legacies: Memory, Identity and Narrative (UWP, 2013).

www.pieds-noirs.stir.ac.uk

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Annabelle Wilkins

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Dr Annabelle Wilkins is a social and cultural geographer with research interests in home, migration and the city. She is a Research Associate at the University of Manchester, working on the AHRC-funded project Translation, interpreting and the British humanitarian response to asylum seeker and refugee arrivals since the 1940s.

Understanding historical and political contexts to contemporary refugee movements.

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