A Global History of the Railways in the Colonial Spaces of the German Empire and the United States, 1884-1918 (working title)

The project analyzes the development of the railroad in German and American colonial territories between 1884 and 1918, from the beginnings of German imperial expansion to the end of the Great War. It concentrates on the colonial possessions of both countries but also includes a perspective on the effects of colonial railways on the home countries, thus extending the analysis across conventional spatial divisions between colony and metropole while covering the exchange of ideas between the colonial powers. By creating an analytical field which concentrates on the entangled histories of colonial railway projects conducted by the United States and the German Empire, this project demonstrates how the railway served a range of purposes in the colonial territories. The research concentrates on four dimensions of the railways' effects on the colonies: space, labor, economy and knowledge. Railways are not analyzed as a mere instrument of colonial power, instead, the project focuses on their productive dimension in the colonial dispositive of power, especially how they helped to territorialize new spaces, created new economic orders, tested and developed labor regimes that included direct and indirect coercion and in producing and applying knowledge. 

I studied Anglo-American History, Medieval and Modern History and Political Sciences at the University of Cologne. From 2008 to 2012, I worked on my dissertation at the School of History, University of Leeds, concentrating on the history of the Immigration Restriction League (IRL). In my studies, I combined a Foucauldian approach including governmentality, biopolitics and subjectivation with critical race and whiteness studies to focus on the IRL as a nodal point between scientific racism, Anglo-Saxon identities, civic commitment and the state's apparatuses of security.

My PhD was funded by an international scholarship from the University of Leeds and complemented by a six-month scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). I also received research scholarships from the Houghton Library (Harvard University), the German Historical Institute Washington, D.C., the library of the John-F.-Kennedy Institute (FU Berlin), the Worldwide Universities Network, the Royal Historical Society and the Economic History Society.

Together with fellow post-graduate students Say Burgin and Madeleine-Sophie Abbas, I organized the White Spaces postgraduate conference, held at Leeds University in August 2010. Out of this conference, the three of us developed a concept for a special issue of the Critical Race and Whiteness Studies e-journal.

In 2014, I spent 5 months as a postdoctoral fellow of the Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard University and received a two-month postdoctoral fellowship from the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., to conduct archival research at the National Archives and the University of Michigan.

2014: Seminar "Technology and Imperialism", Technische Univeristät Darmstadt

2013: Seminar “The History of Canadian Immigration Policies in Global Perspective”, John-F.-Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin

2010: Post-graduate tutor, HIST2351, “The American Century, 1941-1980”, School of History, Leeds University

2009: Post-graduate tutor, HIST1210, “The History of the Modern World”, School of History, Leeds University

Chapters in Books

“White Subjects, Governmentality and Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1894-1924”, in Eva Bischoff and Elisabeth Engel (eds.): Colonialism and Beyond – Race and Migration from a Postcolonial Perspective. Periplus Studien, Vol. 17 (Berlin: lit Verlag, 2013), pp. 33-52.

The Transnational Biopolitics of Immigration Restriction in the United States and White Settler Colonies, 1894-1924”, in Eva Bischoff, Norbert Finzsch and Ursula Lehmkuhl (eds.): Provincializing the United States. Colonialism, Decolonization and Post-Colonialism (Heidelberg: Winter, 2014), pp. 121-153.

Articles

“The Visibility of Whiteness and Immigration Restriction, 1880-1930”, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies e-journal, 9, 1 (2013), special issue: New Territories in Whiteness Studies, ed. by Madeleine-Sophie Abbas, Say Burgin, Robert Julio Decker and Shona Hunter. full text avaible online.

“Citizenship and its Duties: The Immigration Restriction League as Progressive Movement”, Immigrants and Minorities, 32, 3 (2014), pp. 162-182.

Book Review

Right to Ride. Streetcar Boycott and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Journal of American Studies, vol. 44 (2010), e68.

""Colonial Spaces, Serialized Heterotopias, and Instilling Capitalist Work Ethics", International Workshop New Agendas for Critical and Radical History , International Institute for Social History, Amsterdam University, 11 December 2014.

""Following Britain's Lead? Colonial Railways in the Philippines". . Historians of the Twentieth Century United States / Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians Annual Conference , University of Reading, 6 September 2014.

""The Question of Labor: The Construction of Colonial Railways in the Philippines and Namibia”. Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Annual Conference Lexington, Kentuck, 22 June 2014.

""Whiteness, Biopolitics and Governmentality: Rethinking Critical Race Theory with Foucault”. Keynote Address, New Perspectives in a Postrace World? Interrogating Critical Whiteness Studies Workshop, Centrum für Postcolonial und Gender Studies, Universität Trier, 5 July 2013.

“Citizenship and its Duties: The Immigration Restriction League as a Progressive Movement”. Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH) Annual Conference, Cambridge, 16 October 2011.

"Biopolitics at the Border: The Immigration Restriction League and Immigrant Inspection”, American Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modes of Power, 4^thInternational Conference, Graduate School of North American Studies, John-F.-Kennedy Institute, Free University Berlin, 28 May 2011.

“The Transnational Biopolitics of Whiteness and Discourses on Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1894-1924”. States of Statelessness Postgraduate Intensive Masterclass, University of Sydney. Attendance funded by the Worldwide Universities Network, 23 July 2010.

“Americaniz­ation and Immigratio­n Restrictio­n”, Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS) Annual Meeting, University of Sussex, 2 July 2010.

"The Transnational Biopolitics of Immigration Restriction in White Settler Colonies”, Bio-Politics across Borders: Ideas and Practices Graduate Conference, Columbia University, New York, 9 April 2010.

“The Transnatio­nal Biopolitic­s of Whiteness: ­ Discourses­ on Immigratio­n Restrictio­n in the United States and in White Settler Colonies”, Provincializing the United States: Colonialism, Decolonization and Post-Colonialism, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Amerikastudien, Wittenberg, 12 February 2010.

“Tests ‘found to be so valuable in Australia’: White Settler Colonies and the Discourse on Immigration Restriction in the United States”, Re-Orienting Whiteness Conference, Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association, Monash University, Melbourne, 4 December 2009