Dr Aileen Lichtenstein

I’m a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Northumbria University. My current project examines the experiences of political exile through the history of emotions. By drawing on the experiences of German political refugees between the 1840s and 1940s, the project assesses the role of emotions such as love and friendship, longing for liberty, hope, loyalty, ambition, anger, jealousy, belonging and loss in the complex, narrow environment of exile participatory politics. It considers how exiles thought about the role of emotions in political life to understand how these were expressed and performed, how they shaped activism and identities, and how they were received by different audiences. This project is an ambitious endeavour to entangle time periods, geographies and refugee groups which are generally studied separately. It aims to re-embed the generations of political refugees who lived outside the German borders into a new history of modern Germany to include those who were mobile and did not fit neat nation-state categories and conventions.

Before joining Northumbria in October 2025, I completed a PhD at the University of Glasgow and worked as a lecturer in European History at the University of East Anglia and the University of Stirling before completing a brief stint as a Teaching Fellow in Modern History at the University of Warwick. I have also held a Charlotte Nicholson Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Glasgow where I studied the political lecture tours  of American anarchists Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman and Voltairine DeCleyre across Britain (1888–1903). My first book Transatlantic German Anarchism: Resistance Cultures between London, New York City and Berlin is under contract with the New Historical Perspectives series of the Royal Historical Society, the Institute for Historical Research and the University of London Press.