Wolfson Foundation Scholarship awarded to Southampton PhD student

Congratulations to Charlie Knight who has been awarded a Wolfson Foundation scholarship for his PhD project 'A Personalised Phenomenon. The Link Between Knowledge of the Holocaust and Refugee Concern for Those Left Behind'.

Research into the history of German-Jewish refugees in Britain has long been a central topic for the Department of History and the Parkes Institute. With his PhD project, Charles Knight will be making his own contribution to this field by working at the interstices of Migration Studies and Holocaust Studies. In continuation of his MA dissertation (Exeter), Charlie aims to find more letter collections, both in a wide range of archives and from private families, and create a database that will allow him to analyse these networks. Based on this source collection, he will use a micro-historical approach to study how refugees tried to find information about those left behind and how they expressed their emotions of fear and anxiety in writing. This study will also aim to show how a History of Emotions can be useful for our understanding of the connection between the migration experience and the Holocaust.

The dissertation will be supervised by Joachim Schlör and Tony Kushner. We are very happy to welcome Charlie to our postgraduate research community.