For the first seminar of 2025, we welcome Lauren Ashley Bradford’s presentation on her doctoral dissertation project that investigates women’s involvement in racial terror across Nazi Germany and Jim Crow America.
Part of our new seminar series: Humanitarianism, Refugees and the Holocaust.
This event is organised as part of the Genocidal Captivity exhibition events series. The PhD and a Cup of Tea doctoral seminar series is designed for early-career researchers and PhD candidates to present their research for feedback from other researchers, PhD candidates, and faculty.
This talk focuses on Jewish refugees who travelled to Japan, and who in the process often made journeys covering multiple countries across land and sea. For example, many Jews who arrived in Kobe, a city in Japan, in the early 1940s arrived via Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union, having used the Trans-Siberian railway and sea travel to cross multiple borders.
During the First World War, nearly 300.000 refugees and prisoners of war were displaced to Turkestan, which brought the local population into direct contact with a conflict that was being waged thousands of miles away in Russia’s Western borderlands and on the Caucasus front. After the end of the war and the collapse of the Russian Empire, Central Asia once again became host to refugees fleeing catastrophe in Soviet Russia. In 1921, when famine struck the Volga region, the Soviet government transported thousands of people to remote parts of the nascent USSR.
During the Second World War, a coalition of international aid organizations provided important humanitarian aid to the Jewish and non-Jewish internees in the internment camps of Unoccupied France from 1939 onward. That humanitarian aid extended through the summer and autumn of 1942, when the deportations to Auschwitz via Drancy began.
For her doctoral dissertation Gdalit Neuman researched the earliest dance repertoire of Israel’s Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company’s founding artistic director, the late Yehudit Arnon, in the framework of Hashomer Hatzair Zionist youth movement in Hungary in the immediate post-war period.
Charlie Knight is a Postgraduate Researcher at the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton. He is funded by the Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities for his research into German-Jewish refugees from Nazism in Britain.
We are pleased to announce a new seminar series ‘Humanitarianism, Refugees, and the Holocaust’, which will run throughout the 2023/2024 academic year.
Franziska Lamp is currently working as a project researcher at the Department of Contemporary History of the University of Vienna (Austria) and is doing her PhD as part of a larger project on the negotiation of migration regimes in post-war Austria and beyond.
