DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Interests

Geographic Field(s):  Modern European History: Central/Eastern Europe

Principal Research Interest(s):  20th Century Germany, Migration, Race in Europe, Memory Studies, Gender and Sexuality

Schedule a time for office hours - https://calendly.com/laurenstokes

Biography

Lauren Stokes (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2016)

Lauren Stokes is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, where she teaches classes on German and European history, comparative fascism, migration history, gender history, and the “History of the Present.”

She is author of Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford 2022), and several articles on migration history, including “The Permanent Refugee Crisis in the Federal Republic, 1949—” and “Racial Profiling on the U-Bahn: Policing the Berlin Gap during the Schönefeld Airport Refugee Crisis.”

She has also co-edited both a special issue of Central European History on the borders of the German Democratic Republic (with Ned Richardson-Little) and a collection of essays on Racism and Anti-Racism in Divided Germany (with Michelle Kahn).

She currently serves as book review editor for Contemporary European History (please get in touch if you have an idea for a review essay) and is honored to serve as a “Member at Large” in the Central European History Society (please say hello at our traditional AHA Bierabend). Her past research has been supported by organizations including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Council on European Studies, the Central European History Society, and the Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study.

Her current book project, The Jet Age in Eight Passengers, examines the history of civil aviation through the collective biographies of eight figures who have defined the jet age—from the business traveler to the hijacker, the deportee to the flight shame activist. She also has ongoing research projects on the history of bisexuality (with a forthcoming article in Journal for the History of Sexuality) and on right-wing environmentalism.

She accepts applications from graduate students in 19th and 20th century Germanophone history and post-1945 European history. Significant thematic and methodological overlap—such as in migration history, history of the family, gender, and sexuality, or social histories of transportation and infrastructure—is more important the further your project is from her core competency in Germany since 1945.

Publications

• "Fear of the Family" Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of\
  Germany, New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
• “Dear Life Protectors! Women in Right-Wing Environmentalism in the Federal Republic of Germany," Women on the Right: Politics and Social Action in Comparative and Transnational Perspective, 1870s-1990s, edited by Clarisse Berthezène, Laura Lee Downs and Julie V. Gottlieb (London: Bloomsbury, 2025): 217-244.
• Lauren Stokes, “Vom Auffinden der Gastarbeiter in der Gastarbeitergeschichte,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft Volume 70, no. 1 (January 2022): 40-49. (Link)
• " 'Emigration Is Not Inevitable': The Critique of Free Circulation and the Italian Federation of Migrant Workers and Their Families," Journal of Modern European History 23, no. 1 (2025): 83-98.
• [with Ned Richardson-Little] “Bordering the GDR: Everyday Transnationalism, Global Entanglements and Regimes of Mobility at the Edges of East Germany,” Central European History 56, no. 2 (2023): 159-172.
• “Racial Profiling on the U-Bahn: Policing the Berlin Gap during the Schönefeld Airport Refugee Crisis,” Central European History 56, no. 2 (2023): 236-254.
• “The ‘Market-Conforming’ Family: Foreign Families, the ‘Grandmother Solution’ and the West German Welfare State,” Contemporary European History 32, no. 2 (2023): 221-234.
• “Vom Auffinden der Gastarbeiter in der Gastarbeitergeschichte,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft Volume 70, no. 1 (January 2022): 40-49.
• “The Protagonists of Democratization in the Federal Republic,” German History Volume 39, no. 2 (June 2021): 284-296.
• “The Permanent Refugee Crisis in the Federal Republic, 1949—” Central European History Volume 52, no. 1 (March 2019): 19-44.
• “ ‘An Invasion of Guest Worker Children’: Welfare Reform and the Stigmatisation of Family Migration,” Contemporary European History Volume 28, no. 3 (August 2019): 372-389.