2024-25 Graduate Student Liaison
About
Paige Newhouse is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “Revisiting the Right to Stay? Vietnamese Migrants in Postwar Germany, 1978-2000,” examines Vietnamese migrants in Germany and the struggle for some to stay in a unified country after 1989. It explores how Germans had to rethink categories of labor migrant, refugee, and asylum seeker in a changing world without clear political adversaries. She received a Fulbright Study/Research Grant from the German-American Fulbright Commission (2021-2022) and two US Department of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships (2021, 2019). Most recently, she produced Reverb Effect during the 2023-24 season.
As an Eisenberg Institute fellow, Newhouse will continue drafting her dissertation. She will work on a chapter about Cold War refugees and Vietnamese asylum seekers in West Germany in the late 1970s. This chapter will explore how West Germans imagined political asylum and who could receive it, contextualizing debates around asylum that reappeared in the immediate post-1989 period.
