History/Political Science paper by Scheibner, Tamás
British Refugee Aid after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (Accepted)
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
Drawing on new archival research, this presentation will explore who were the most important non-governmental actors in refugee aid in the UK. In addition to acknowledging the prominent role of the British Red Cross, the presentation aims to draw attention to institutional and individual actors who have received less attention in previous research, but without whom the process of relief and integration would have been much more difficult. The presentation will focus on both international INGOs and organizations that have limited their activities specifically to the UK. Among the former, the focus will be on the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief (Oxfam), which was set up during the Second World War to eradicate poverty but which over time expanded its charitable activities to other missions. Various women's organizations, such as the British Federation of University Women (BFUW), were also actively involved in helping Hungarian refugees, with the specific aim of supporting women intellectuals. Last but not least, attention is also drawn to social actors who, because of their high social status (in the political arena or among the aristocracy), were in a position to intervene personally on behalf of the refugees and to bring the Hungarian cause to the attention of the English elite. Through these various institutional and individual actors, the lecture aims to shed new light on the development of British reception policies and related social practices.
I propose to place this presentation in the same section as the presentations by James Niessen and Gusztáv Kecskés.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Tamás Scheibner (MA in Hungarian Studies, ELTE, 2003; MA in History, CEU, 2006; PhD in Comparative Literature, ELTE, 2012) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of History of the ELKH Research Centre for the Humanities and Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies and Hungarian Literature at ELTE University of Budapest. He is currently the principal investigator of the project "The Post-1956 Refugee Crisis and the Hungarian Emigration" and co-editor (with Gusztáv Kecskés) of a handbook on the subject. He formerly held visiting positions at Aarhus University, the University of Vienna, Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität), Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, the University of California, Irvine, and was a Fulbright Fellow at Stanford University. In 2013/2014, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania. His more strictly historically oriented projects include the history of émigré communities and international organisations during the Cold War.