Dr Anna Maguire

Profile

I am a historian of migration and war in modern British history. I completed my AHRC funded collaborative award PhD at King's College London and Imperial War Museums in 2017 on colonial experience of encounters during the First World War. I then worked as a Teaching Fellow at King's before starting as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in October 2019.

Research

Research Interests:

My current postdoctoral research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, puts contemporary concerns about hosting refugees in Britain within their historical context to explore the evolution of charitable responses to refugees and consider how refugees responded. Was Britain a welcoming place for those who sought refuge within its borders? This project uses humanitarianism as a lens to examine ideas of ‘sanctuary’ and ‘tolerance’ in Britain after the Second World War. The dual strands of this research – the construction of Britain as a sanctuary for refugees by charities and refugee experience of charity – will provide a deep understanding of who was welcomed into Britain and what that welcome meant. Against a background of decolonisation, mass migration and the welfare state, this project offers fresh perspectives on ‘arrival’ in Britain and moral qualifiers of ‘good’ citizenship.

My broader research interests include:
- Experiences and representations of migration
- Histories of conflict in Britain and the British Empire
- Space, contact-zones and urban history
- Intersections of race, gender, sexuality and class
- Public history, heritage and commemoration

Publications

Anna Maguire, ‘“I felt like a man”: West Indian Troops under Fire During the First World War’, Slavery & Abolition, 39, 3 (2018), pp. 602-621.

Anna Maguire, ‘Uncovering the Colonial Cultures and Encounters of the British Empire during the First World War’, Inside World War One? Ego-Documents and the First World War ed. by Dorothee Wierling and Bessel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 207-230.

Anna Maguire, ‘The Sphinx and Shepheard’s Hotel: Colonial Tourism in Egypt during the First World War’, Dhau, Jahrbuch für außereuropäische Geschichte 3 (2018), pp. 44-64.

Anna Maguire, ‘Transnational Lives: Colonial Life-writing during the First World War’, Edinburgh Companion to the First World War and the Arts, ed. by Ann-Marie Einhaus and Katherine Baxter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 95-108.

Anna Maguire, ‘Looking for Home: New Zealanders in London during the First World War’, The London Journal, 41, 3 (2016), pp. 281-298.