To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Józef Gierowski, the precursor of post-war Judaic studies at Polish universities, an online-format conference was organized by the Institute of Jewish Studies, Jagiellonian University on 22.-23.11.2022: “Żydzi polscy w oczach historków – nowe perspektywy” [Polish Jews in the Eyes of Historians – […]
Yearly Archives: 2022
37 posts
The UnRef Principal Investigator Michal Frankl joined the recent episode of the EHRI podcast, hosted by Katharina Freise. Michal Frankl investigates No-Man’s Lands and the fate of the refugees who ended up in these desolate places. In this episode, he talks about a photograph on the cover of a French […]
On November 21, 2022 Lidia Zessin-Jurek chaired a discussion accompanying the exhibition on the situation of Jews with Polish citizenship, deported by the Germans to the Polish border in 1938. The fate of Jewish refugees blocked on the Polish side of the border in Zbąszyń is the subject of the […]
Exploratory workshop Among the multifaceted transformations of East-Central Europe in the 1990s, mobility and open borders turned into one of the symbols of the new attachment to the “West”, in both the physical and symbolical way. The quick adoption of the 1951 refugee convention, the introduction of national asylum procedures […]
A new article by Francesca Rolandi (Unlikely Refuge?) has been just published in the recent Historijski zbornik, Vol. 75 No. 1, 2022, entitled “Who is in and who is out? Escapes, expulsions, and the creation of new boundaries during D’Annunzio’s rule in Fiume (1919-1920)”. This article aims to tackle one […]
The interdisciplinary conference centralises the temporal dimension of borders, borderlands, and border regions in and beyond 19th and 20th century Europe. It is organised in a hybrid format by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and the Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network (TEIN) in collaboration with the Borders in […]
The team members of the “Unlikely Refuge?” ERC Project will participate at this year’s convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). The event will take place in Chicago, USA, between 10-13 November 2022. Chaired by Michal Frankl (Principal Investigator), the panel entitled Humanitarianism and Refugee […]
Michal Frankl and Lidia Zessin-Jurek participated in the workshop “Memory, Migration and Populism: The Post-Imperial Historical Legacy and Heritage of Central and Eastern Europe”, organized by the Department of Mobility and Migration, Institute of Ethnology, CAS, 13th – 14th October 2022. For the event’s full program please click here or […]
Maximilian Graf published his article entitled “Humanitarianism with Limits: The Reception of Refugees from the Global South in Austria in the 1970s” in the recent special issue of the Zeitgeschichte journal. The volume was edited by Wolfgang Mueller and Dirk Rupnow and focused on “Migrants and Refugees from the 1960s […]
Lidia Zessin-Jurek (ERC Project Unlikely Refuge?) was invited to a special session of the Badacze i Badaczki na Granicy (Researchers on the Border) group organised by Kamila Fiałkowska and Natalia Judzińska as part of the 11th Conference of the Migration Research Committee of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), held […]
The UnRef’s research fellow Doina Anca Cretu published her chapter entitled Securitized Protection: Health Work and the Making of Refugee Camps in Wartime Austria-Hungary in the new book edited by Ritem Kowner and Iris Rachamimov (Cornell University Press, 2022). For full text click here. Read more on Out of Line, […]
Abstract This article explores the development of modern refugee camps in Austria-Hungary during the First World War by looking at the organization and implementation of child assistance in the camps. The article argues that a state-driven mobilization of relief and rehabilitation was organized to alleviate the plight of refugee children. […]
The UnRef team joined the conference “Humans in Motion: War Crisis and Refugees in Europe 1914-1923”, held at the Institute of History at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland (29 June – 01 July 2022). The conference was convened by Kamil Ruszała (Jagiellonian University) and Petra Svoljšak (ZRC SAZU). The […]
The recent issue of the Hungarian Studies Review (Vol. 49, Issue 1, July 2022) features two publications by the members of the Unlikely Refuge? team. The UnRef PI Michal Frankl published his article entitled “Mobilizing National History against Refugees: A Czech Polemic on Migration”. His text analyzes the radical anti-migration […]
Nikola Karasová and Julia Reinke presented today their joint paper entitled “We provide aid, like we would help brothers or sisters”? Practicing Solidarity with Greek Civil War Refugees in Socialist Czechoslovakia and the GDR. They participated in the workshop Comparing cultures of solidarity: socialist internationalism and solidarity across the Eastern […]
The UnRef’s principal investigator Michal Frankl joined a public debate on involuntary migration and integration of refugees in the Czech Republic. The in-person event was organized by the intercultural festival RefuFest in Prague on 24 June 2022 at 6 p.m. CET. The working language was Czech. The recording of the […]
Today, on 17 June 2022 at 4:30 CET, you can join online a webinar entitled “And then came the law”, commemorating the 1942 constitutional law on Jewish deportations from Slovakia. Michal Frankl will present a paper on first deportations of 1938, comparing the case of Nazi Germany and the Slovak […]
Please visit the official website of the German Historical Institute Warsaw The event will be transmitted by Zoom (June 30, 10 a.m. CET) Join Zoom Meeting
In this interpretation of his family’s refugee trajectory of survival, Yoram Eckstein touched upon the questions of fate and the room for maneuver within the context of the Second World War and the Holocaust, in which European Jewry found itself: Could Jews really decide their fate? […] It is also […]
In the Western public imagination, there is a certain image of a refugee deserving of our help: poor rather than rich, a woman rather than a man, frail rather than healthy. At the same time, the “ideal refugee” is supposed to be very similar to us, which would make it […]
In a recent interview for the online podcast of a popular Czech newspaper Blesk, Michal Frankl explained the public responses to the current refugee influx from Ukraine to Czechoslovakia by putting it into a historical perspective. For the full video in Czech please click here.
On 23-26 May 2022, Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) participated in a conference at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw entitled Bridging Divides. Rupture and Continuity in Polish Jewish History. She presented a paper entitled “Three times a refugee – exile as a leading motif in the memoirs of Polish Jews” […]
Together with Ivan Jeličić (University of Rijeka) and Dominique Reill (university of Miami), UnRef’s Francesca Rolandi will discuss their recently published article within the EUI seminar series Social Politics in European Borderlands. The title of the paper is “Redefining Citizenship after Empire: The Rights to Access Welfare, to Work, and […]
The international conference Spaces and Locations of Migration, organized by the University of Vienna on 12-13 May 2022, will feature two presentations by the UnRef team. The project PI Michal Frankl will present on No Man’s Land for Refugees. Scrutinizing Spaces of Migration Beyond the Nation State, while Lidia Zessin-Jurek […]
The UnRef PI Michal Frankl was invited to give a public lecture titled Support and Control: Refugees in the Czech Lands. The event will take place in the Prague Municipal Library on 19 May 2022 from 5 p.m. The working language will be Czech. The lecture will focus on two […]
In a new online interview, the UnRef Principal Investigator Michal Frankl assessed the current humanitarian efforts aiding Ukrainian refugees, putting them in a wider historical perspective. You can access the text in Czech at Lidovky.cz.
The UnRef’s Doina Anca Cretu published an article titled “Ukraine’s Refugees and the Muddy Waters of Aid: Some Early Thoughts” as part of the New Fascism Syllabus’ blog series Ukrainian Dispatches. You can access the full text here in English.
The Principal Investigator of the Unlikely Refuge? project, Michal Frankl, commented on the First World War Jewish Refugees to Moravia for iDnes.cz. The article was published on 4 April 2022 and its full version in Czech is available here.
After pushing back Middle Eastern refugees into the forests on its northern border with Belarus, Poland is now welcoming an unprecedented number of displaced Ukrainians. Deep racial and gender stereotypes are at play in this double standard, and an idea of heroic patriotism that doesn’t understand the people who don’t […]
Research position for a scholar at risk ERC project Unlikely refuge? Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences Initial deadline May 15, 2022 Full-time position for 24 months The ERC-Consolidator project Unlikely refuge? Refugees and citizens in East-Central Europe opens a new position for a scholar at […]
We invite you to join the hybrid event titled Staatsbürgerschaft: Norm und Praxis politischer Zugehörigkeit im Europa, 1914–1945, organized by the German Historical Institute Paris (DHIP) on April 11, 2022, at 6-8 p.m. (CET). Discussants: Dieter Gosewinkel (Berlin), Michal Frankl (Prague), Claire Zalc (Paris)Moderator: Axel Dröber (DHIP) The discussants are […]
Exploratory workshop Among the multifaceted transformations of East-Central Europe in the 1990s, mobility and open borders turned into one of the symbols of the new attachment to the “West”, in both the physical and symbolical way. The quick adoption of the 1951 refugee convention, the introduction of national asylum procedures […]
The UnRef’s PI Michal Frankl was interviewed by a Czech-language online magazine Reportér. In the article, published on 2 March 2022, he reminds of WWI refugees from the territory of today’s Ukraine arriving in Austria-Hungary (including the Czech lands) during the First World War. Not only the Volhynian Czechs but […]
Maximilian Graf (Unlikely Refuge?) will give a lecture titled Mythos und Realität: Österreich als Ziel osteuropäischer Migration im Kalten Krieg at University of Basel on 2 March 2022. The presentation examines how and why the Austrian state’s dealing with migration from Eastern Europe changed from the 1970s to the early […]
Images of refugees being trapped at the eastern Polish border have evoked memories of another time: in 1939, Polish Jews fleeing from Nazi-occupied Poland eastwards were denied entry to the Soviet Union and were stuck right at the same place as people today, along the river Bug. Reflecting on the […]
On 16 January 2022, an article titled The war has not yet broken out and Tiso has already launched deportations. People languished in no man’s land (in Slovak) was published online by Aktuality.sk. The text is based on the research of UnRef PI’s Michal Frankl as well as on an […]