History of Mobilities & Migration

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


Projects


In Global Transit

In Global Transit currently consists of two separate pillars: a conference series and resulting research network and individual projects from GHI research staff.

Migrant Connections

Migrant Connections is a digital research infrastructure for historical research on German migration to the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Events & Conferences


Jun 14, 2023

Jewish Archives, Artefacts and Memory in Transit

Virtual Exhibition Panel | Christine Schmidt (Wiener Holocaust Library), Simone Lässig (GHI Washington), Anna-Carolin Augustin (GHI Washington), Indra Sangupta, (GHI London), Christina von Hodenberg (GHI London)

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Jul 04, 2023

Historicizing the Refugee Experience, 17th–21st Centuries

Third Annual International Seminar in Historical Refugee Studies Duisburg | Organized by the University of Duisburg‐Essen (UDE), the German Historical Institute Washington (GHI) and the American Historical Association (AHA), in cooperation with the Interdisciplinary Center for Integration and Migration Research (InZentIM), the Institute for the Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) and the Centre for Global Cooperation Research (KHK/GCR21)

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Sep 18, 2023

Bucerius Young Scholars Forum Histories of Migration: Transatlantic and Global Perspectives

Seventh Annual Bucerius Young Scholars Forum | Pacific Office of the GHI in Berkeley & Sitka, AK | Conveners: Holly Guise (The University of New Mexico), Sören Urbansky, and Nino Vallen (both Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington, Berkeley)

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Dec 04, 2023

Chinese Migration and the Imagination of Pacific Worlds

International Workshop & Lecture Series, Berkeley & Stanford | Conveners: Sören Urbansky (Pacific Office Berkeley, GHI Washington) and Nino Vallen (Pacific Office Berkeley, GHI Washington)

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Apr 14, 2024

Music, Knowledge, and Global Migration, ca. 1700−1900

Symposium at the University of California, Berkeley | Conveners: Tina Frühauf (Columbia University/The CUNY Graduate Center, New York), Simone Lässig (German Historical Institute Washington), and Francesco Spagnolo (The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, UC Berkeley)

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Jul 14, 2024

Making a World of Many Worlds: Identities, Activisms, and Comparisons

Summer School | Pacific Office, Berkeley | organized by The Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CALAS), the Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington (GHI) at UC Berkeley, and the Collaborative Research Center (SFB) 1288 “Practices of Comparing” at Bielefeld University

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Publications


Bulletin 70 (Fall 2022)

Forum: Rethinking Cross-Border Connections

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Anna 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.

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Bulletin 69 (Fall 2021 & Spring 2022)

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Paul Lerner, Uwe Spiekermann, Anne Schenderlein, eds.

Jewish Consumer Cultures in Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Europe and North America

Worlds of Consumption. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022.

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Simone Lässig, ed.

Digital History

Special Issue, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 47.1 (2021)

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Jan C. Jansen & Simone Lässig, eds.

Refugee Crises, 1945-2000: Political and Societal Responses in International Comparison

Publications of the German Historical Institute. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

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Latest News


Call for Papers

Making a World of Many Worlds: Identities, Activisms, and Comparisons

Deadline: October 1, 2023 | Summer School | Pacific Office, Berkeley | July 14–18, 2024

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Call for Papers

Music, Knowledge, and Global Migration, ca. 1700−1900

Deadline: October 1, 2023 | Symposium at the University of California, Berkeley | April 15−16, 2024

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Opportunities

Intern at the German Historical Institute

Deadline: July 31, 2023 | The GHI Internship Program gives students of history, political science, public relations, and public administration at…

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New Publication

Fall 2022 Bulletin (70) issue published and available for download

The latest issue of the Bulletin is now available online for download as well as in print.

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Video

Watch recording of our event "Trying to become "German"

If you were unable to watch our event "Trying to become "German": Author Can Merey in Conversation with Historian Michael Printy" live, it is now…

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