German Historical Institute Washington opens Branch Office “GHI WEST“ at the University of California, Berkeley
February 2, 2017
On February 1, 2017, the German Historical Institute Washington opened GHI WEST, a branch office located on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. In collaboration with the UC Berkeley’s Institute of European Studies, the new office will establish and coordinate an international interdisciplinary research network on “Migration and Knowledge.”
The GHI will use its new outpost in California to build research network that will bring together scholars working at the intersection of migration history and the history of knowledge. The opening of the branch office is part of the strategic development initiative of the Max-Weber-Stiftung. It will also raise the profile of the GHI Washington, which, under Director Simone Lässig, has placed the history of knowledge, along with digital history, at the center of its activities. Through target cooperation with other institutions – not least the offices the Max-Weber-Stiftung recently opened in New Delhi and Beijing – GHI WEST will give new impulse to international and interdisciplinary exchange in research on migration, not least by facilitating dialogue between European and North American scholars and their colleagues in Latin America and the Asian Pacific region. A central focus for the research network will be migrants as conveyors and producers of knowledge. Special attention will be given to the role of migrant children and young people as mediators or “translators” between cultures.
With the opening of GHI WEST on the UC Berkeley campus, the GHI in expanding its cooperation with scholars and institutions in the western U.S. and Canada. The new branch office also signals the importance of California as a research hub for German scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Moreover, as GHI Director Simone Lässig emphasizes, “more than any other state in the union, California’s past and present has been shaped by migration. It is thus in every way an ideal location for our work.”
The GHI will formally celebrate the opening of GHI WEST in early November 2017 with the inaugural “Bucerius Lecture on Histories of Migration” funded by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, one of Germany’s most important non-profit foundations.
Dr. Sarah Beringer
Research and Press Coordinator
German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NWWashington, DC 20009
Phone +1 202 387-3355
beringer@ghi-dc.org