Join organisers Rachel Pistol, Russell Endo and Conrad Caspari for talks on the history and legacy of internment

These talks present the story of how, following attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, over 30,000 Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants from the U.S were arbitrarily incarcerated first in prison facilities and then in hastily established camps across the U.S and how these histories continue to be relevant for current political discourse.

Rachel Pistol is Principal Research Fellow and Director of the UK Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI-UK) at the University of Southampton. She is a digital historian who focuses on Second World War internment in the UK and the USA, immigration in the UK and the USA pre-WW2, and refugees in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s. She has published widely on all of these topics including Internment during the Second World War: A comparative study of Great Britain and the USA (Bloomsbury, 2017). Rachel’s latest edited collection, The Obama Administration: Perceptions and Encounters (Bloomsbury, 2025) has been recognized as one of Choice’s Outstanding Academic Texts for 2025

Russell Endo is an emeritus professor of sociology and Asian American studies at the University of Colorado. He has been teaching and doing research in Asian American studies since 1970, and he helped create Asian American studies programs at the University of Washington, Cornell University, and the University of Colorado. Russ is currently investigating the World War II arrests and imprisonment of enemy aliens, primarily in Southern California. He is the historian for the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition and a researcher for the Amache Alliance and a coalition supporting legal challenges to the U.S. government's contemporary use of the Alien Enemies Act. During World War II, members of his family were incarcerated at Tuna Canyon, Santa Anita, Jerome, Rohwer, and Manzanar..

Conrad Caspari is a member of the Board of Directors for the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition, the camp where his father, Fritz Caspari, was interned during WW2, and the Director of Agri-food and Bioenergy Consulting Ltd. He has a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics and a MSc. in Agricultural Economics from Oxford University. Conrad worked for the Food and Drink Industries Council and the Economist Intelligence Unit in London before joining the Agra CEAS Consulting Ltd. in 1986. He was Managing Director of this company for 15 years before setting up an independent consultancy. He has directed well over 500 projects both in the EU-28 and worldwide for both the agri-business sector as well as for national and international institutions.

Description supplied by the event organiser.