EHRI-UK Regional Placements 2025
During summer 2025, eight archival and heritage institutions from across the United Kingdom took part in the first EHRI-UK Regional Placement Scheme. The scheme provides postgraduate and undergraduate students with the opportunity to enhance their employability and learn new skills during a 4–8-week work placement at organisations holding Holocaust-related collections. Students were hosted by Imperial War Museums, The Fed (Manchester), The National Archives, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Queen’s University Belfast Special Collections & Archives, The Warburg Institute, The Wiener Holocaust Library, and World Jewish Relief.
​
Read on to find out more about each placement.
The National Archives - Anna Brady
Anna Brady undertook her placement at The National Archives Kew, where she worked with Dr William Butler and his team on records of Jewish communities in Britain’s former colonies. Anna’s PhD research on Jewish refugee experience within the semi-colonial city of Shanghai aims to address the intersections of Holocaust and colonial histories. The placement offered her an opportunity to engage with collections documenting the Beau-Bassin Jewish Detainment Camp in Mauritius. The collections include detainee letters as well as administrative material. A blog detailing Anna’s work and stories she has uncovered within the collections will be published on The National Archive website in January 2026, to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
​​​
"The placement gave me a useful framework for my research and – hopefully – will help TNA to raise awareness of holdings overlooked within their own collections and relevant to a developing area of Holocaust scholarship."
World Jewish Relief - Hannah Buckley
Hannah carried out her placement at World Jewish Relief (formerly known as the Central British Fund for German Jewry) in London. WJR was founded in 1933 to support Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe before, during, and after the Second World War. The organisation was instrumental in rescuing around 65,000 Jewish refugees, including almost 10,000 predominantly Jewish children brought to the UK through the Kindertransport scheme. Today, World Jewish Relief operates as a global humanitarian agency, providing refugee support, humanitarian aid, and critical assistance to vulnerable Jewish communities worldwide. Hannah carried out research on the organisation’s extensive collection of case files and focused on identifying stories from northern England, informed by her own subject expertise and PhD research on the postwar lives of Holocaust survivors who settled in Yorkshire and Northern England.
​
"Beyond contributing to my academic research, the placement offered a unique opportunity to engage directly with the archival material of an organisation that played a vital role in helping thousands of Jewish refugees escape Nazi persecution… The placement allowed me to develop practical skills in archival methodology, narrative adaptation for diverse audiences, and cross-departmental collaboration."
Imperial War Museum, London - Megan Davis
Imperial War Museums London hosted Megan for a research and cataloguing placement based around documents relating to Liesel Dale, a volunteer of the Austrian Resistance movement as well as records from the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Megan was trained in the use of Axiell Collections software and gained hands-on experience of how archival materials are stored, catalogued, and accessed. She learned how to search for and call down items, evaluate their condition and significance, and input detailed metadata to support future researchers. During her placement, Megan worked with a wide variety of source types, including personal testimonies, legal records, photographs, and ephemera. Her handling and cataloguing of the material related to the Nuremberg trials provided Megan with a deeper understanding of the legal and historical significance of the trials and the complex narratives surrounding justice and accountability after the war. Her contribution to this project was recognised when she was invited to the premiere of the film Nuremberg during November 2025.
​
"During my time at Imperial War Museums, I have had an incredibly rewarding and transformative experience that has deepened both my historical knowledge and my practical archival skills. From the moment I began, I felt genuinely inspired by the work being done around me and the sense that every document, object, and testimony held within the collections contributes to a vital and living record of the past."
Public Record Office of Northern Ireland
- Mischa Gerrard
Over the course of Mischa’s placements at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland she worked with a collection of files concerning Jewish refugee visa applications to Northern Ireland made under the 1937 New Industries Development Act. The files contained letters of reference, examples of work, business proposals, correspondence, and official documentation submitted by individuals and families seeking refuge from persecution in Europe. Mischa’s work involved quality assurance of the digitised materials, ensuring the accuracy, completeness, and consistency of the scanned files, and indexing the applications. In the course of this work, Mischa was also able to contribute historical context that deepened the project team’s understanding of the collection. Her work has contributed to the creation of a comprehensive, searchable index that will substantially enhance access to this material for future researchers. While the work was often emotionally challenging, it reinforced the ethical dimension of archival research: the obligation to bear witness, to handle historical memory with care, and to restore humanity and voice to those who were denied both.
"My placement at PRONI, through the EHRI–UK Regional Programme, has been one of the most meaningful academic experiences of my career to date. It bridged archival practice, digital preservation, and ethical historiography in a way that directly informed both my scholarly development and personal sense of responsibility as a researcher."
The Wiener Holocaust Library - Xian Yu Jee
Xian’s placement with The Wiener Holocaust Library involved tracing the provenance of collections using The Wiener Library Bulletin and Newsletter, locating external repositories with a connection to the Library, and tracing the paper collections of interviewers in Dr Eva Reichmann’s Eyewitness Testimony project in the 1950s. The work involved large amounts of detective work, following changes in names, associations and locations. This placement is part of a wider project at The Wiener Library, tracing associations with the founder of the Library, Dr Alfred Wiener, and understanding how one of the world’s leading collections on the Holocaust developed over time. Part of Xian’s work was to highlight how the Library as it exists today has been shaped by a collective effort building on Alfred Wiener’s foundation.
​
Xian wrote a blog about his time at The Wiener Holocaust Library that can be read here.
​
"My work here was like reading a huge multi-coloured patchy tapestry that told the story of the Library and its place in Holocaust studies, while getting to help patch some of it together."
The Warburg Institute - Ursy Reynolds
Ursy’s placement at the Warburg Institute in Bloomsbury, London, focused on the organisation’s ongoing project of documenting the lives and networks of refugee scholars displaced by the Holocaust, which aligns closely with her own research. The placement work was divided between practical archival training, independent cataloguing, and public engagement. Working closely with the organisation’s Graduate Archive Trainee, Ursy was trained in the use of archive management software and learned how to create and structure catalogue entries for letters. Her proficiency in German enabled her to decipher handwritten documents in the collections, focusing initially on three scholars associated with the Institute: Lothar Freund, Walter Solmitz, and Leopold Ettlinger as well as independently cataloguing letters by Alphons Barb, Herta Schubart, and Claire Lachmann. Additionally, Ursy undertook detailed biographical research and compiled ‘authority files’ within CALM for several prominent figures connected to the Warburg, including Ruth Wind, Ernst Cassirer, Heinz Cassirer, and Nikolaus Pevsner. In the final week of the placement, Ursy wrote a paper for the Warburg website on Leopold Ettlinger and created a content list for a previously uncatalogued archive box containing Ettlinger’s personal material.
You can read Ursy’s paper and see items from Ettlinger’s collection here.
"My time at the Warburg Institute has been invaluable. I leave with greater technical expertise in archival methods, stronger research skills, and a deeper appreciation for the human stories preserved within the Warburg’s collections. Most importantly, I have contributed to the documentation and interpretation of refugee scholars’ lives, ensuring that their intellectual and personal legacies remain accessible to future generations."
The Fed (Manchester) - Natalie Spriggs
Natalie’s placement at The Fed, a social care charity for the Greater Manchester Jewish community, supported the organisation’s My Voice project, a programme which publishes the life story books of Holocaust Survivors and Refugees, from Greater Manchester, the Northwest and London – in their own voices. Natalie’s main task was to transform testimonies into a searchable catalogue on an Excel spreadsheet, with a focus on indexing to support Holocaust education and preservation. She began by reading each survivor’s story several times, carefully extracted key life events and documentary details, translated these insights into a structured and in-depth spreadsheet, and ensured consistency across entries. This work enabled her to develop data management skills and explore new methods of cataloguing while reading survivor testimonies broadened her understanding of the Holocaust’s complexities and human dimensions.
"This experience reinforced my career development in Holocaust education. It strengthened my readiness to support education initiatives, survivor storytelling, and public engagement activities. It also helped me identify pathways for future work within The My Voice Project and other archives that align with my interests in education and memory work. Through this process, I began envisioning how I might contribute to future projects as a practitioner and advocate within future employment capacity."
Queen's University Belfast Special Collections & Archives - Constantin Torve
Constantin’s placement at Queen’s University Belfast Special Collections & Archives focused on the Rabbi Jacob Shachter Collection and a set of letters written by Jewish individuals and families seeking to escape Germany during 1938 and 1939. Constantin’s German language skills and familiarity with handwritten material equipped him to translate the letters and create a calendar of the material to assist visitors to the archive. Of particular interest were letters of reference supplied by former employers, which provided both detailed biographical information and evidence of antisemitic legislation which closed all Jewish-owned businesses and excluded Jews from employment. Constantin’s research documented over 100 letters from individuals asking for help in securing work in the UK as domestic servants. The material calendared illustrates the wide spectrum of occupations in which the letter writers were employed prior to the enforcement of antisemitic employment legislation, including law, commercial chemistry, agriculture and horticulture, butchery and an employee of the Brandenburg Jewish Welfare committee. Constantin’s work provides a vital addition to research guides available for consultation by visitors to QUB Special Collections & Archives.
"It was a tremendous opportunity and enabled me to gain experience in an area beyond my own PhD while also making a meaningful and practical contribution to future archival research."
