On 2 July, we were delighted to host Professor Peter Gatrell FBA to deliver this year’s Royal Historical Society Prothero Lecture: ‘Refugee World(s): a Twentieth-Century Retrospective’.
Peter’s lecture — held at Mary Ward House, London, and online — drew on his recent research in the archives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. The archive contains the letters and petitions that refugees sent to the UNHCR in the post-1945 era, and provides the historian with rare insights of how refugees presented their situation and the responses they received. The numerous case files preserved by the UNHCR disclose the hopes, aspirations and rights claims of displaced people from many different parts of the world, whether or not they were recognised under international refugee law.
As Peter argued in this lecture, to consider refugees’ encounters with refugee-creating, refugee-hosting, and refugee-deterring states – and with the organisations charged with their protection and assistance – offers new approaches to refugee history and the writing of refugees into modern global history.
Our great thanks to Peter for his lecture and to all those who attended in person and online. A video and audio recording of the 2025 RHS Prothero Lecture will be available shortly.
Peter Gatrell FBA is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Manchester. His recent publications include: The Unsettling of Europe: the Great Migration, 1945 to the Present (2019) and the co-authored Refugee Voices in Modern Global History: Reckoning with Refugeedom (2025), which draws on the rich resources of the UNHCR archives to present the personal experiences of mass displacement.
Established in 1969, Royal Historical Society’s Prothero Lecture – which is named for the historian and former RHS President, George W. Prothero (1848-1924) – has been given annually since that date. Those invited to give the lecture are leading historians whose research has shaped how we think about the past.
Prothero lecturers over the past five decades include, among many others, Samuel H. Beer, Joanna Bourke, Linda Colley, Stefan Collini, Natalie Zemon Davis, Olwen Hufton, Sujit Sivasundaram, Quentin Skinner, Brenda E. Stevenson, and Keith Thomas. Many of these lectures, subsequently published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, have been opportunities for leading scholars to reflect on their work and careers in the round.