Guest Fulbright Lecturer meets UG history students

On 17 April 2024, Patrick Leech of the History Department of Baylor University (USA) delivered a talk to a group of UG students entitled: Lilia Alvarez Szabó: Life of a global immigrant in the US. Leech is currently a Fulbright researcher at the Institute of History in the Research Centre for the Humanities in Budapest, Hungary where he uses digital humanities methodologies to help create web resources about Hungarian refugees after the 1956 Uprising. His doctoral dissertation, “Hungarians Over Here: Diaspora, Refugees, and US Cold War Politics” (in process) looks at how the diaspora participated in a global Cold War by examining the response of the Hungarian American community to the resettlement of Hungarian refugees to create a Hungarian-centered narrative of the 1956 Uprising and refugee crisis. UG students listened avidly to the story of Lilia Alvarez Szabó emerging from a five-page report by the Committee on the Judiciary submitted to the House of Representatives on 25 August 1959. This document was used in class to help students understand US immigration policy, its development, and how it played out globally. Leech walked the students through the document and the various “stories” it revealed, including US political history, US-Hungary (Central European) relations, and US-Philippines (and Asia more broadly) relations. Marek Skurski, a graduate assistant in History, administered the meeting.