Sam Knapton, Ph.D., is a historian of central and east-central Europe, forced displacement, and international humanitarianism. She is currently a lecturer at the University of East Anglia in the UK. Her first monograph, Occupiers, Humanitarian Workers, and Polish Displaced Persons in British-occupied Germany (forthcoming, 2022) focuses on the interventions of those 'in the middle' between governing authorities and Displaced Persons (DPs) in post-war occupied Germany. She is also the co-creator of a global network focusing on the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, a founding member of the Polish Studies Group under the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, and part of UEA's East Centre: For the study of East Central Europe and the former Soviet space.

Sam's current projects focus on transnational relations in the post-war world, with a strong emphasis on the position of Anglo-Polish relations within the framework of forced displacement, 'repatriation', and ideas concerning hard and soft citizenship. While at the Pilecki institute, she will be exploring why so many Polish DPs from British-occupied Germany returned to a Poland they no longer saw as home, focusing on how the British and Soviet-backed Polish government used interwar conceptions of 'Polishness' to encourage nation building.