The GHI’s longstanding engagement with the migration of German speakers to North America from the seventeenth century to the present is the foundation for the broader program on the history of migration and mobility that has developed at the institute since 2015. Several GHI-supported projects look beyond the flows of European migrants across the Atlantic and analyze migrant groups and receiving societies around the world, including in a transpacific and inter-American perspective. Particular attention is given to diasporic communities, migrants’ agency and networks, and comparative research on the social and cultural integration of migrants.
The research at the institute also places a focus on spatial mobility and its social impacts and asymmetries by bringing together projects on migration with colleagues working on different mobile groups, objects, information, or ideas. The notion of multiple and uneven mobilities provides the opportunity to explore global and transregional entanglements and ruptures, continuities and disconnections. The conference series and research network “In Global Transit” combines the history of forced migration and mobility studies to explore the spatialities and temporalities of escape trajectories. Current GHI research projects on traffic networks investigate the materiality of infrastructure and how complex networks were managed locally.
The GHI’s research focus on mobilities and migration is closely linked to its established program in the history of knowledge. The roles of migrants as producers and transmitters of distinctive bodies of knowledge is the focus of the “Migrant Knowledge” initiative at the GHI’s Pacific Regional Office. The collaborative project "Migrant Connections" draws on the tools of digital history to explore the ways German emigrants and their family and friends at home created or dismissed transnational spaces of communication and knowledge circulation.
Photo Credit: El Shatt, UNRRA Refugee Camp, 1944. Otto Gilmore/FSA/OWI, Library of Congress.
Team
Viola Alianov-Rautenberg
Research Fellow, GHI Pacific Office
Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington
Institute of European Studies | University of California, Berkeley | 249 Philosophy Hall | Berkeley, CA 94720-2316
Phone +1.202.387.3355
Anna-Carolin Augustin
Research Fellow
German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW | Washington DC 20009
Phone +1.202.387.3355
Jana Dunz-Keck
Research Fellow, Digital History
German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW | Washington DC 20009
Phone +1.202.387.3355
Simone Lässig
Director
German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW | Washington DC 20009
Phone +1.202.387.3355
Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş
Research Fellow
German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW | Washington DC 20009
Phone +1.202.387.3355
Atiba Pertilla
Research Fellow & Digital Editor
German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW | Washington DC 20009
Phone +1.202.387.3355
Isabel Richter
Deputy Director
Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington
Institute of European Studies | University of California, Berkeley | 249 Philosophy Hall | Berkeley, CA 94720-2316
Phone +1.202.552.8936
Swen Steinberg
Affiliated Scholar
German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW | Washington DC 20009
Phone +1.202.387.3355
Projects
Publications
Michelle Lynn Kahn
Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History
Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Read onJan C. Jansen & Kirsten McKenzie, eds.
Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions
Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Read onBulletin 72 (Fall 2023)
Forum: The German Treatment of Soviet Prisoners of War During The Second World War
Read onBulletin 71 (Spring 2023)
Read onAnna Corsten
Unbequeme Erinnerer: Emigrierte Historiker in der westdeutschen und US-amerikanischen NS- und Holocaust-Forschung, 1945–1998
Transatlantische Historische Studien. Band 62. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2022.
Read on