Rachel Pistol

Rachel Pistol is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Southampton's Department of History and Parkes Institute, currently serving as Director of the UK Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI-UK). She holds an Honorary Research Fellowship at the University of Exeter and previously held roles at King’s College London and Royal Holloway. Her research focuses on Second World War internment, refugee migration, and digital humanities. She earned her BA, MA, and PhD from Royal Holloway, where she won the College Postgraduate Teaching Prize (2016) for innovative methods. She also lectured in Business Information Systems and Quantitative Methods at Kingston University.

Education:

• PhD in History, Royal Holloway, University of London
• MA in History, Royal Holloway, University of London
• BA in History, Royal Holloway, University of London

Research Interests: Rachel’s work combines digital methods with comparative history to explore 20th-century internment policies, refugee experiences during Nazi oppression, and Holocaust memory. She collaborates with institutions like the Wiener Holocaust Library and National Archives to digitize archival materials and enhance accessibility. Her projects include mapping UK internment camps and databases on internees deported to Canada/Australia.

Articles & Trends: Recent publications analyze WWII internment strategies, refugee population dynamics, and U.S.-UK comparative frameworks. Her work bridges quantitative analysis with cultural memory studies, emphasizing ethical archiving and digital curation.

Awards:

• College Postgraduate Teaching Prize (2016)

Advising & Grants: Active in supervising PhD students (e.g., Terence Harold Dockley) and managing EHRI-UK’s infrastructure development. She advises World Jewish Relief on archival accessibility, focusing on refugee records from the 1930s–40s.

Labs/Teams: Leads EHRI-UK and collaborates with the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure. Member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Exeter and EXILE (German/Austrian Exile Studies).