Video and audio recordings of the Society’s 2025 Prothero Lecture, with Professor Peter Gatrell FBA, are now available. This year’s lecture — ‘Refugee World(s): a Twentieth-Century Retrospective’ — took place on 2 July, in person and online.
Watch the video of the lecture
Listen to the lecture
Peter’s lecture 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.
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.
Forthcoming public lectures with the Royal Historical Society
The Society’s lecture programme continues in September / October with the following three events:
- Friday 12 September 2025: Professor Yasmin Khan (Oxford), ‘Mars and Britannia: the British Imperial Way of Warfare’ (Mary Ward House, London and online)
- Wednesday 17 September 2025: Professor Matthew J. Smith (UCL), ‘Twice Removed: Slavery, Big Data, and the Cultures of Caribbean Ancestral Histories’, part of the Society’s visit to historians at the University of Aberdeen
- Wednesday 22 October 2025: Professor Tim Grady (Chester), ‘Unravelling the Tapestry of Death: Britain and the Memory of the Two World Wars’, part of the Society’s visit to historians at the University of Suffolk, Ipswich
Further details of each of these lectures will be released shortly.