P.h.D. 2026
She/her/hers
About
Paige Newhouse is a historian of modern Germany with interests in race and migration. 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. During the Cold War, Germans across the Iron Curtain used division to control migration from the Global South. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political and legal terrain that explained migration changed shape. Western leaders quickly integrated the former GDR into a liberal and federalist legal framework, partly by building foreigner registration offices (Ausländerbehörden) across the East, sending asylum seekers to the East, and expanding a Western border regime along the Eastern frontier. Leaders of post-unity Germany embraced “open” borders within Western Europe while strengthening their eastern border with Poland and Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic).
Newhouse shows how Vietnamese were at the center of different German migration regimes: from refugee protection in the 1970s to the socialist labor programs in the 1980s to the increasingly unregulated labor that took shape after 1989-1990. German leaders introduced exclusionary measures to regain control over migration. They assigned Vietnamese laborers from the former GDR the legal label “contract worker” in effort to force them to leave the country. They introduced the right to reside regulation, giving Vietnamese workers a renewable permit to stay if they met certain conditions. They amended Article 16 of the constitution (the Basic Law), which promised to protect politically persecuted persons. As a result, people who traveled from European Community member states and countries that followed a Western framework for human rights no longer qualified for asylum. After the Vietnamese government refused to readmit Vietnamese nationals who were deported against their will, German leaders turned to readmission treaties with Vietnam and neighboring states to deport unwanted migrants. German leaders started to construct a Fortress Germany and more broadly, a Fortress Europe.
Newhouse 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
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
