Jo Laycock (@jolaycock.bsky.social)

‘Refugee World(s): a Twentieth-Century Retrospective’: the 2025 Prothero Lecture, with Peter Gatrell On 2 July 2025, the Royal Historical Society hosted its annual Prothero Lecture, given this year by Professor Peter Gatrell FBA on the subject of ‘Refugee World(s): a Twentieth-Century Retrospective’. 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. 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. 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. https://bit.ly/4kw8GKU