Rachel is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter, and worked on an interdisciplinary ESRC project using data analysis, databases, and OCR software. Post-Exeter she moved to work at King's College London on the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) and is the National Co-ordinator for EHRI-UK. She completed her BA, MA, and PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London under the supervision of the late Professor David Cesarani OBE. Whilst studying for her doctorate she lectured in History at Royal Holloway, winning the College Postgraduate Teaching Prize in 2016 for her innovative teaching methods. She also held a lectureship at Kingston University in Business Information Systems and Quantitative Methods.

For more information about Rachel's work, visit her website.

Rachel Pistol is a public speaker and author on immigration history and Second World internment in the UK and the USA. She is particularly interested in the individual experiences and the memory of internment. She is currently researching the memory and memorialisation of internment camps, refugee experiences in the UK, refugee trajectories, and digital approaches to immigration and internment history.

Rachel's research interests include:

• Immigration and refugee history
• Second World War internment in the UK
• Internees deported from the UK to Canada and Australia
• Second World War internment in the USA
• Parallels between the history of the 1930s and 1940s and current events
• Commemoration and the preservation of historical sites
• Internment camp economies
• The history of racism and discrimination
• Information management and data analysis
• Digital research methods

Rachel has appeared on the BBC and Sky News and been interviewed for various television documentaries. She has written several articles for The Conversation that have been reprinted both in the UK and the USA, most notably in Newsweek and The Independent.