Ruth Balint

My research focuses on transnational histories of refugees, and migration, primarily between Europe and Australia. I currently lead two Australian Research Council - funded projects: Russian Immigrants and Anti-Communism in Cold War Australia, 1946-1966, and The Holocaust as an Australian Story, 1933-1954: An Intimate History. These two projects are both located in Australian migration history, with a special current focus on Jewish migration. I am particularly interested in the ways in which immigrant women experienced displacement and resettlement, and how they challenged and navigated ideas about the family. I have now secured a new Australian Research Council grant to lead a project exploring The Pearl Rush: Pearl Merchants in Broome and the Global Pearl Trade, which returns me to an earlier interest of mine, the tradeways of the Indian Ocean. This project makes visible the stories of the adventurers and the itinerant travellers who connected remote outposts to thriving commercial centres across the globe, often relying on old networks of family and community connections. My monograph Destination Elsewhere: Displaced Persons and their Quest to Leave Postwar Europe is published with Cornell University Press (November 2021) https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501760228/destination-elsewhere/#bookTabs=1. It explores the encounters of refugees with the international aid agencies, western immigration agents and Allied forces after the war, which helped shape the creation of international refugee law and the instruments of refugee welfare and humanitarianism that emerged after 1945. Smuggled: An Illegal History of Journeys to Australia (NewSouth Publishing, 2021, co-authored by Julie Kalman) is a direct intervention in current political discourse linking people smuggling and refugees, giving people with lived experience of flight to Australia a chance to tell their experiences to an Australian audience: https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/smuggled/ I welcome applications for supervision from students interested in Australian history, migration histories (including European migration history), modern Jewish history and histories of the family. I am currently UNSW lead of the Scholars at Risk program, and the co-lead of the UNSW Forced Migration Research Network. Historical studies, transnational histories of refugees, migration between Europe and Australia, Australian migration history, Jewish migration, immigrant women, displacement and resettlement, family, Indian Ocean tradeways, refugee law, humanitarianism