Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş

Research Fellow

German Historical Institute Washington
1607 New Hampshire Ave NW | Washington DC 20009
Phone +1.202.387.3355

liebisch@ghi-dc.org

Biographical Summary

Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş is a historian of modern Europe in global perspectives. Her research centers on the interplay between transboundary phenomena (like international organizations, air mobility, or migration) and territorial developments (like nation building,  drawing borders, and mobility management). Before she joined the GHI as a research fellow in October 2020, she taught courses in modern history at the University of Kiel for four years. From 2013 to 2016, she was a doctoral candidate at Heidelberg University and member of the research group “Subaltern Diplomacy, 1930-60“ (led by Madeleine Herren) at the Cluster of Excellence „Asia and Europe in a Global Context.“ The project adopted a postcolonial perspective on the League of Nations and made use of digital tools (League of Nations Search Engine, lonsea.org) to focus attention on actors in the internationalist realm who up to that point had been neglected. Focusing on Turkish nationalists who dealt and interacted with the League of Nations, her PhD project revealed the deep-rooted, yet asymmetrical and conflictual entanglements between interwar internationalism and nation building in Turkey. In 2015, she spent one term as guest student lecturer at the University of Chicago as well as two months at the Orient-Institut Istanbul. Her first monograph Verflochtene Nationsbildung. Die Neue Türkei und der Völkerbund 1918-38 was published in 2020. In her new project, she explores airport transit zones as historical sites. Tracing their development back to the mid-20th century, she investigates their shifting and contested function in the transnational management of global air traffic. Furthermore, she is preparing a book on the role of airports in the history of migration regimes.

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Main Areas of Interest

  • International History and Global History (19th-20th Centuries)
  • ­History of modern Europe, esp. Germany and Turkey
  • ­International Organizations and Internationalism
  • ­Mobility/Border Studies
  • ­Migration and Aviation History