Biography
I have just completed an AHRC-funded PhD dissertation entitled ‘From ‘soup-kitchen’ Charity to humanitarian Expertise? France, the United Nations and the Displaced Persons Problem in post-war Germany’ at the University of Exeter. The thesis was supervised by Prof. Martin Thomas and Prof. Richard Overy and examined in January 2014 by Prof. Patricia Clavin (Oxford) and Prof. Richard Toye (Exeter).
My research considers how French diplomats, administrators and relief workers approached the question of Eastern European Displaced Persons (DPs) in post-war Germany, in cooperation with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and later the International Refugee Organisation (IRO). The thesis demonstrates that distinctive diplomatic constraints, economic requirements and cultural differences influenced the thought and practice of refugee humanitarianism, shaping alternate ways of arranging interim provision and ‘rehabilitating’ DPs in the French zone of occupation.The core arguments of my thesis thus contribute to debates on nationalism, internationalism and refugee humanitarianism in the mid-twentieth century.
Bibliography
'Not by bread alone? UNRRA relief workers and the ‘rehabilitation’ of European Displaced Persons in Gutach, 1945-1947’ in Ludivine Broch and Alison Carrol (eds) France in an Era of Global War, 1914-45: Occupation, Politics and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). When most relief workers had never heard of Freud. UNRRA in the French occupation zone, 1945-1947’, in Sandra Barkhof (ed) War and Displacement in the Twentieth Century: Global conflicts (London: Routledge, 2014). Book
Outcast Europe. Refugees and Relief workers in an Era of Total War, 1936-1948. (London: Continuum, 2011), co-authored with Sharif Gemie, Fiona Reid and Louise Ingram.