“Refugees in Empire: Jewish Refugees in British India”
Professional Background
Pragya Kaul is a PhD candidate in the department of history at the University of Michigan, where she also holds a fellowship from the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. Pragya’s research has been supported by the Leo Baeck International Fellowship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (2020–2021). Prior to her candidacy, Kaul received a bachelor’s degree in history and politics from the University of Edinburgh, and a master’s degree in history from the University of Toronto.
Ms. Kaul has conducted extensive archival research in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Switzerland, and India to trace the migration of Jewish and non-Jewish European refugees to British India. Her work draws upon her knowledge of Hindi, Urdu, Yiddish, and German, to access both Jewish and Indian perspectives on Jewish refugeedom in the British Empire. She is well-versed in the use of photographs, oral histories, and institutional records in order to uncover Jewish experiences of refuge in a world of empires, and uses sources in Dutch, German, French, English, and Spanish.
Fellowship Research
Pragya Kaul was awarded the Kurt and Thea Sonnenmark Memorial Fellowship for her dissertation project, “Refugees in Empire: Jewish Refugees in British India.” Her project investigates Holocaust refugees in British India to understand how they navigated a world of empires. Her research uncovers refugees’ experiences in the Empire through their interactions with the British colonial government and Indians, including local Jewish communities. She is particularly interested in how nationality, class, and race impacted refugees’ experiences in their places of asylum and underscores the importance of imperial discourses in shaping refugeedom.
Ms. Kauls’s time at the Mandel Center will be dedicated to using government and institutional records to research refugees’ agency in bureaucratic processes of lawmaking. Furthermore, she will focus on personal papers and photographs of Jewish refugees accessible at the Mandel Center.