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
Anna-Carolin Augustin
Research Fellow
German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW | Washington DC 20009
Phone +1.202.387.3355
Jana 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
Albert Manke
Research Fellow, GHI Pacific Office
Pacific Regional Office of the German Historical Institute Washington
Institute of European Studies | University of California, Berkeley | 249 Moses Hall | Berkeley, CA 94720-2316
Phone +1.510.643-4558
Atiba Pertilla
Research Fellow & Digital Editor
German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW | Washington DC 20009
Phone +1.202.387.3355
Claudia Roesch
Research Fellow
German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW | Washington DC 20009
Phone +1.202.387.3355
Swen Steinberg
Affiliated Scholar
German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW | Washington DC 20009
Phone +1.202.387.3355
Sören Urbansky
Research Fellow & Head of Office, 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 +1.510.643.4558
Nino Vallen
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 +1.510.643-4558
Projects
Publications
Bulletin 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 onBulletin 69 (Fall 2021 & Spring 2022)
Read onPaul 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.
Read onBulletin 68 (Spring 2021)
Read onJan 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.
Read on