People

Research Team

Rebecca Tipton

Rebecca Tipton is Lecturer in Interpreting and Translation Studies at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies, University of Manchester. She is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project Translation, interpreting and the British humanitarian response to asylum seeker and refugee arrivals since the 1940s. She is also part of the AHRC-funded Open World Research Initiative consortium, as a research associate on the ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community’ Multilingual Communities strand. Rebecca has worked as a freelance interpreter with asylum seekers and refugees since the late 1990s. Her research on public service interpreting is aimed at shaping policy debates on reducing health and social inequalities for some of society’s most vulnerable service users and promoting quality interpreter-mediated services in statutory and non-statutory service contexts.

She is the co-author of Dialogue Interpreting: A Guide to Interpreting in Public Services and the Community (Routledge, 2016). She is co-editor of Ideology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation (Multilingual Matters, 2017) and of the Routledge Handbook of Translation and Pragmatics (Routledge, 2019).

Her research has been published in international journals including The Translator, Translation and Interpreting Studies, Language and Comm-unication and Interpreting.  

Peter Gatrell

Peter Gatrell has spent much of the past 20 years studying the history of population displacement in the modern world. His books include a trilogy on refugee history: A Whole Empire Walking: Refugees in Russia during World War 1 (Indiana University Press, 1999), Free World? The campaign to save the world’s refugees, 1956-1963 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford University Press, 2013). He also retains an interest in the economic and social history of modern Russia to which he devoted much of the first half of his academic career. His new book, The Unsettling of Europe, a history of Europe since 1945, with a focus on migration in/to Europe, will appear with Penguin Books and Basic Books in August 2019.

He has directed several research projects on population displacement, state-building and social identity in the aftermath of the First World War and the Second World War. In July 2018 he started a three-year collaborative research project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, entitled “Reckoning with refugeedom: refugee voices in modern history, 1919 to 1975”. He is Co-Investigator on the on the AHRC-funded project Translation, interpreting and the British humanitarian response to asylum seeker and refugee arrivals since the 1940s.

Peter is affiliated to the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Research Institute (HCRI). In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Annabelle Wilkins

Annabelle Wilkins is a social and cultural geographer with research interests in home, migration and the city. Her doctoral research explored relationships between home, work and migration among Vietnamese communities in East London. She is Research Associate on the AHRC-funded project Translation, interpreting and the British humanitarian response to asylum seeker and refugee arrivals since the 1940s. 

Annabelle is the author of Migration, Work and Home-Making in the City: Dwelling and Belonging among Vietnamese Communities in London, which will be published by Routledge in April 2019.  Her research has also been published in journals including Area and Gender, Place and Culture. Annabelle is Associate Editor of Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture.

Advisory Board

Hilary Footitt

Hilary Footitt (University of Reading, UK) has written widely on languages in war, conflict and post conflict situations. Between 2008 and 2011, she was Principal  Investigator for the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project, Languages at War: policies and practices of language contacts in conflict, conducted with the Imperial War Museum, London. Between 2015 and 2018, she was Principal Investigator for the AHRC project, The Listening Zones of NGOs: Languages and Cultural Knowledge in Development Programmes, conducted with OxfamGB, Christian Aid, Save the Children UK, Tearfund, and Southern NGOs and communities in Kyrgyzstan, Malawi and Peru. She is co-editor of the Palgrave Macmillan series Languages at War. She is also co-editor of the Handbook of Languages and Conflict (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, with M. Kelly and M.Salama-Carr). She is co-author of War Talk: foreign languages and the British war effort, 1940-46 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, with S. Tobia), and of Languages at War: policies and practices of language contacts in conflict (Palgrave Macmillan 2012, with M. Kelly). Her research has been published in international journals including Language and Intercultural  Communication and the Journal of War and Culture Studies.

Hannah Niblett

Hannah Niblett is Collections Access Officer at the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre (AIUC), which is a specialist library and archive on race and migration, based at Manchester Central Library and the University of Manchester.  Hannah works primarily with the AIUC’s historic archives and oral history collections, generating engagement with academic and public communities and supporting the generation of new archive collections through heritage project work. As part of the Translating Asylum advisory board she is interested in the issues and ethics of collecting mother language oral histories, the implications for their use in research, and as deposited collections beyond the life of the project. She is also interested in the public engagement outputs of the project, such as physical exhibitions, digital interactives and community events, and the potential for hosting these activities through the AIUC at Manchester Central Library.

 Eleanor Davey

Eleanor Davey is a Senior Lecturer in the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954-1988 Cambridge University Press (2015). This book is a study of the changing paradigms of French engagement in the ‘third world’, from far left activism to modern humanitarianism. Prior to joining HCRI, she was a Research Officer in the Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute, where she led a multi-year project entitled ‘A Global History of Modern Humanitarian Action’, promoting engagement with historical analysis in aid practice and policy-making. She has published on the place of historical perspectives on humanitarian aid, co-edited a special issue of Disasters journal on this question, and participated in a Past & Present roundtable on the historiography of humanitarianism. Her current research interests lie in the relationship between humanitarianism, the laws of war, and the ideas and organisations of national liberation. Her teaching includes subjects on the history of humanitarianism, discourses and practices of aid organisations in conflict settings, and the role of memories especially in relation to political violence.

My Tang Trinh

My Tang is a Vietnamese interpreter based in the South East and former social worker. She has worked extensively with the Vietnamese community in Britain since the 1980s.