Paige Newhouse

Paige Newhouse is a historian of modern Germany with interests in race and migration.Her scholarship explores race, migration, and citizenship through the lens of Vietnamese migrations to the GDR, the FRG, and post-unity Germany. Her monograph project, Revisiting the Right to Stay: Vietnamese Migrants in Contemporary Germany, examines Vietnamese migration both West and East Germany before and after 1989. She explores how the Cold War defined the terms of Vietnamese migration to Germany across the Iron Curtain. Once the Cold War ended, Germans had to rethink their frameworks for migration as Vietnamese workers pushed through traditional boundaries of categories for migrants. This project has received generous support from the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Rackham Graduate School, and the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia (predoctoral grant). In addition, Newhouse has received multiple FLAS awards for Vietnamese. Newhouse completed research towards this project from 2021-2022 under the guidance of Dr. Gökçe Yurdakul at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She graduated from the University of Michigan's doctoral program in History in 2026. 

Publications

"Managing Vietnamese Motherhood: Race, Gender, and Labor in East Germany," included in Lauren Stokes and Michelle Kahn (eds.), Racism and Antiracism in Divided Germany, Peer Reviewed, Cornell University Press, 2026

Digital Humanities Projects

Doctoral Intern/Fellow,  Inclusive History Project at the University of Michigan

Research Assistant, 1817 Project, Inclusive History Project at the University of Michigan

Season Producer, Reverb Effect at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies

• Produced 6 podcast episodes with themes ranging from the Soviet Antiwar Movement to Syriac Christians and the Immigration Act of 1924

Co-creator, Everyday Life: Roles, Motives, and Choices During the Holocaust

• An educational database for undergraduate and high school students at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Part of the HistoryLab at the University of Michigan

Selected Service
Graduate Student Liaison (2024-2025), Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies
Migration/Immigration Network Representative for the Social Sciences History Association
Co-coordinator (2023-2024), European History Workshop
Co-coordinator (2019-2021), Migration & Displacement Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop

Courses

Lead Instructor

HIST 195: Sex, Drugs & Communism: Writing Cold War Berlin

Graduate Student Instructor

Hist 322: Origins of Nazism
Hist 312: History of European Integration
Hist 341: Nations and Nationalism
Hist 318: Europe: Era of War