On 26 June 2025, Nikola Tohma received the 2025 CEFRES Platform Award for the Best Article in Social Sciences and Humanities. This award is organized by the French Embassy to the Czech Republic, CEFRES, and its Platform with the support of the Young Talent Foundation. Nikola received the award for her article […]
Media
22 posts
Our colleague Doina Anca Cretu was interviewed for the July edition of NewsNet, published bi-monthly by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). Talking about her work on refugees, refugee camps, and foreign humanitarian aid, she also introduced her new book. In Foreign Aid and State Building in […]
The French magazine “Memoires en Jeu” in its special Spring 2024 issue devoted entirely to “Memories of Refugees,” features an interview with our team member, Lidia Zessin-Jurek, on the role of social memory in the current Polish response to the refugee situation on the Belarusian-Polish border. “History and memory are […]
Francesca Rolandi (Unlikely Refuge?) earned together with Dominique K. Reill and Ivan Jeličić the Annelise Thimme Article Prize for 2021-2022. It was awarded by the Central European History Society for their co-authored article “Redefining Citizenship after Empire: The Rights to Welfare, to Work, and to Remain in a Post-Habsburg World.” […]
We tend to push them aside on a daily basis, but the faraway conflicts, consequences of climate change and hunger, have long been reaching Europe’s borders, including, for some time, those of Eastern Europe. They take the form of refugees on our doorstep. What happens to these people once they […]
The UnRef Principal Investigator Michal Frankl joined the recent episode of the EHRI podcast, hosted by Katharina Freise. Michal Frankl investigates No-Man’s Lands and the fate of the refugees who ended up in these desolate places. In this episode, he talks about a photograph on the cover of a French […]
In a recent interview for the online podcast of a popular Czech newspaper Blesk, Michal Frankl explained the public responses to the current refugee influx from Ukraine to Czechoslovakia by putting it into a historical perspective. For the full video in Czech please click here.
In a new online interview, the UnRef Principal Investigator Michal Frankl assessed the current humanitarian efforts aiding Ukrainian refugees, putting them in a wider historical perspective. You can access the text in Czech at Lidovky.cz.
The UnRef’s Doina Anca Cretu published an article titled “Ukraine’s Refugees and the Muddy Waters of Aid: Some Early Thoughts” as part of the New Fascism Syllabus’ blog series Ukrainian Dispatches. You can access the full text here in English.
The Principal Investigator of the Unlikely Refuge? project, Michal Frankl, commented on the First World War Jewish Refugees to Moravia for iDnes.cz. The article was published on 4 April 2022 and its full version in Czech is available here.
After pushing back Middle Eastern refugees into the forests on its northern border with Belarus, Poland is now welcoming an unprecedented number of displaced Ukrainians. Deep racial and gender stereotypes are at play in this double standard, and an idea of heroic patriotism that doesn’t understand the people who don’t […]
Research position for a scholar at risk ERC project Unlikely refuge? Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences Initial deadline May 15, 2022 Full-time position for 24 months The ERC-Consolidator project Unlikely refuge? Refugees and citizens in East-Central Europe opens a new position for a scholar at […]
The UnRef’s PI Michal Frankl was interviewed by a Czech-language online magazine Reportér. In the article, published on 2 March 2022, he reminds of WWI refugees from the territory of today’s Ukraine arriving in Austria-Hungary (including the Czech lands) during the First World War. Not only the Volhynian Czechs but […]
On 16 January 2022, an article titled The war has not yet broken out and Tiso has already launched deportations. People languished in no man’s land (in Slovak) was published online by Aktuality.sk. The text is based on the research of UnRef PI’s Michal Frankl as well as on an […]
Listen to the final episode of the Experiencing Epidemics Podcast series with Doina Anca Cretu (UnRef), co-hosted by Ian Hathaway, Jorge Díaz Ceballos, and Gašper Jakovac. In the episode titled The World War, refugees, and the long history of epidemics, Doina Anca Cretu explores some facets of a terrible humanitarian […]
Listen to the second episode of the “Eastern Europe’s Minorities in a Century of Change”, a podcast series on the history of minorities and minority experiences in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe prepared by the BASEES Stud soundcloud.com. In this episode, Michal Frankl, principal investigator of the ERC-funded project “Unlikely […]
Michal Frankl and Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) co-authored a short article titled “Desperate Situation of Refugees in the Polish-Belarusian Borderland Brings Back Gloomy Memories of the 1939 Limbo.” The text was published online in Czech by Deník N on 27 September 2021. You can access it here.
Lidia Zessin-Jurek (Unlikely Refuge?) wrote an article titled “Polish refugees in no man’s land. When the borderline was a legal vacuum” (in Polish Polscy uchodźcy na ziemi niczyjej. Gdy linia graniczna była próżnią prawa). The text, which deals with refugees trapped in no man’s land on the German-Soviet border in […]
Photo: Radek Miča, Universitas Chci vepsat uprchlíky zpátky do dějin Evropy, říká historik Michal Frankl Pro svůj ambiciózní projekt věnující se uprchlíkům ve středovýchodní Evropě ve 20. století získal před dvěma lety ERC konsolidační grant. Historik Michal Frankl z Masarykova ústavu a Archivu Akademie věd se tak stal prvním humanitněvědním badatelem na […]
Press release of the Czech Academy of Sciences, published on November 29, 2018 The historian of the Masaryk Institute and Archive of the CAS Michal Frankl (1974) has received funding from the ERC (European Research Council), one of the most prestigious scientific grants in the world,of in the amount of […]