2023-24 Graduate Student Research Fellow
About
Pragya Kaul is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan’s Department of History and Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. In the summer of 2023, she is the Kurt and Thea Sonnenmark Memorial Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, Washington, DC. Her research on Holocaust refugees in the British Empire has additionally been supported by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. Kaul’s dissertation, entitled “Refugees in Empire: Jewish Refugees in India,” reframes refugee histories of the Holocaust along the frameworks of empire. In doing so, it demonstrates how imperial laws and regulations shaped refugee experiences in the early twentieth century.
As an Eisenberg Institute fellow, Pragya Kaul will continue drafting her dissertation on Jewish refugees from Hitler’s Europe in the British Empire. The chapters will foreground discussions among European colonial governments, native rulers, and refugee agencies on the activities of Jewish refugees in British India during the Second World War.