What is Resilience in History?

Traumatic memory arises not only from an event itself but from its post-event context—not just what happened, but how meaning is made in retrospect. This talk examined three historical cases where life-story recollection functions as coping mechanism, communal therapy, and response to its time of telling.

 

While events hold the potential for traumatic recollection, there is no straightforward link between experience and memory. Here, I explore how semi-forced and forced migrants navigate the post Second World War era, illustrating traumatic memory’s unpredictable appearance and effects, as well as individual procedures of resilience, and persistence or dissolution of troubling past events over time. My three case studies are : Donall MacAmhlaigh (1926–1989), an Irish laborer turned journalist, writer, and activist, who moved from County Donegal to the English Midlands in 1951. Bibi Inder Kaur (1917–1996), a teacher and advocate for Indian women’s rights, who relocated from Karachi to (then) Bombay in 1947. Robert Vas (1931–1978), a Hungarian Uprising participant who fled Budapest for London in 1956.

 

Rather than the events themselves, Leese focussed on how these individuals narrate their experiences. Examining their speech, writing, and image-making reveals distinct historical formations of traumatic memory and resilience, showing how troubled pasts may remain dormant, surface as intrusive sensations, or dissipate over time.

 

 

Peter Leese is a social and cultural historian, an Associate Professor, and a co-Principal Investigator at the Centre of Excellence for Culture and the Mind at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His publications include Migrant Representations: Life Story, Investigation, Picture (2022) and Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (2014). He is also a co-editor of Migrant Emotions: Inclusion and Exclusion in Transnational Spaces (2024, with Sonia Cancian and Soňa Mikulová) and Languages of Trauma: History, Media, Memory (2021, with Jason Crouthamel and Julia Köhne). Leese’s current research is a transcultural, cross-disciplinary study of traumatic memory and resilience from the 18th to the 21st century.