Biographical Summary

Sarah Frenking is a historian interested in the history of police, crime, gender, and sexuality. She is currently a visiting research fellow at the GHI Washington. Before coming to DC, she was a research fellow and lecturer in the Freigeist Project “The Other Global Germany: Transnational Criminality and Deviant Globalization in the 20th Century” at the University of Erfurt. She is also an associated researcher at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin and the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam.

Sarah obtained her PhD from the University of Göttingen in 2020 with a dissertation on the history of border control at the French-German border since the end of the nineteenth century. Her first monograph, Zwischenfälle im Reichsland. Überschreiten, Polizieren, Nationalisieren der deutsch-französischen Grenze 1887-1914 was published in 2021 and examines the practices of border making, the agency of different border crossers, and the media echoes to border incidents leading to an increasing national interest in the border.

During her fellowship in Washington, Sarah will be working on her second book project, which explores the history of Mädchenhandel (traffic in women) and the intersections of mobility and prostitution from the 1920s to the 1960s. This research spans from sexual concerns about the French occupied Rhineland through the era of National Socialism, the Vichy regime and World War II, extending into debates surrounding decolonization and Postwar moral anxieties.