About
Pragya Kaul is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan’s Department of History and a Todd M. Endelman and Zvi Y. Gitelman Fellow at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies. In 2023, she is a Fellow at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, and a Fellow at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. In 2020-2021, she was a Leo Baeck International Dissertation Fellow at the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. She has additionally been awarded grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the German Historical Institute.
Her dissertation titled "Refugees in Empire: Jewish Refugees in British India, 1921 - 1951" investigates how imperial states administered refugees as they moved across the porous borders of empires. Centering the experiences of Holocaust refugees in British India, this dissertation investigates European, Indian, and British ideas of race and class in their relation to refugee movements in societies with strict, racialized social hierarchies. It asks, how did the interdependence between imperial states and their semi-sovereign or colonized territories impact the diverse structures and systems of laws and institutions that administer refugees to the present day? Moreover, how did Jewish refugees respond to and participate in their changing categorizations prior to and following the start of the Second World War? This research uses Kaul's knowledge of German, Hindi, Urdu, French, and Yiddish, and is being conducted in archives in the United Kingdom, Germany, India, and the United States.
Professional Affiliations:
- Frankel Center for Judaic Studies
- American Historical Association
- Association for Jewish Studies
- German Studies Association
Courses Taught:
Lead Instructor:
- WN 2024: HIST 195 - "The Refugee from Empires to Postcolonies"
Teaching Assistant:
- FA 2018: The Holocaust
- WN 2019: Arab-Israeli Conflict
- FA 2019: History of American Jews
- WN 2020: Origins of Nazism
