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From November 2025, I will hold a UKRI Future Leaders’ Fellowship, leading a research team for initially four years to work on the public history project, ‘Nation of Refuge.’ This project seeks to take the national temperature about how we think and talk about the history of Britain offering refuge/asylum to those fleeing persecution, and to change the conversation in research and the public sphere by looking back at the last ca. 100 years of British history, exploring continuities and differences in how Britain has responded to this issue.  

Previous Work

My first book, Hitler’s Victims: Refugee Memoirs of Nazi Persecution for British Readers during Appeasement and War (Berghahn, forthcoming) explored contemporary British responses to Nazism through the lens of who its victims were understood to be. In this work, I tried to understand what information about Nazi persecution systems was available to ‘ordinary people’ in Britain at the time, as well as news about the escalating persecution of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe. I explored autobiographical texts that were published by anti-Nazi refugees from Germany and Austria in Britain, for British readers. I consult archival material to show how these works were received by publishers, institutions such as the Ministry of Information and BBC, and readers at the time. This project was generously funded by the British Academy and Wolfson Foundation (2020-24); by a Martin Miller and Hannah Norbert-Miller Fellowship at the institute of Languages and Cultures, London (September-December 2023); and by an Alfred Landecker Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (2024-25).