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Food, Migration, and Belonging

Food, Migration, and Belonging in 20th Century European History

Convener: Isabel Richter (GHI Washington Pacific Office at UC Berkeley) & Maren Möhring (University of Leipzig)

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Schedule
Monday, September 29, 2025


8:00 – 9:00 a.m.

Welcome and Introductions


9:00 – 10:30a.m.

Panel 1

Where is Home? Migrant Workers and the Challenges of Home-Making

Chair: Daniele Valisena (GHI Pacific Office, Berkeley)

Paige Newhouse (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor): Consuming at the Kaufhalle: Migrant Laborers, Food, and the Creation of Home in East Germany
Comments by Stephanie Rotem (Ariel University)

Yaatsil Guevara González (Heidelberg University): Between Paellas and Baleadas: Cooking as a Home-Making Practice among Honduran Migrants’ Elderly Caregivers in Valencia, Spain
Comments by Gökhan Mura (Izmir University of Economics)


10:30 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

Coffee Break


11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.

Panel 2

Legacies of Scaling: Global Perspectives on Food Cultures

Chair: Deniz Göktürk (UC Berkeley)

Razak Khan (Free University Berlin): Berlinistan: Inter-Asian Migrant Food Cultures and History of Emotions after 1945
Comments by Amy Carney (Pennsylvania State University)

Magdalena Suerbaum (Bielefeld University): Al-gherbe murra (exile is bitter) – Food, Loss and Memory in Syrian Displacement in Berlin and Istanbul
Comments by Tim Corbett (Vienna)


12:30 – 1:30 p.m.

Lunch


1:30 – 2:15 p.m.

Artistic Interlude I

Chair: Maren Möhring (University of Leipzig)

Hannah Beilharz (Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee): Ancestral Hands – Immaterial Maps Across the Tablecloth: Migration Trajectory from Germany to Palestine and Australia
Comments by Claudia Kreklau (University of St. Andrews)


2:15 – 6:30 p.m.

Break


6:30 p.m.

Dinner at Jupiter Restaurant


Tuesday, September 30, 2025


8:00 – 9:30 a.m. PST

Panel 3

A Treat for the Eye: Labeling and Branding Food

Chair: David Do Paço (French Institute, Villa Albertine, San Francisco)

Gökhan Mura (Izmir University of Economics): Contesting Symbolisms of Migrant-Introduced Food Packaging in West Germany and Austria
Comments by Hannah Beilharz (Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee)

Claudia Kreklau (University of St. Andrews): Migration and the Making of Modern Eating: Culinary Transformations and the Cultural Nexus of Central Europe
Comments by Razak Khan (Free University Berlin)


9:30 – 10 a.m.

Coffee Break


10:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

Panel 4

Food Ambassadors: Circulating and Exhibiting Culinary Knowledge

Chair: Fernanda Sada (UC Berkeley, Department of History)

Amy Millet (University of Kansas): Migratory Ideas: How Notions of Belonging Traveled to – and Through – Late Habsburg Austria via Food
Comments by Yaatsil Guevara González (Heidelberg University)

Amy Carney (Pennsylvania State University): Selective Sharing: The Recipes of Risa Pisko in “The Christian Science Monitor
Comments by Magdalena Suerbaum (Bielefeld University)

Tim Corbett (Vienna): Gulasch, Schinkenfleckerl, and Eiernockerl: Exploring the Transatlanticisation of Habsburg Austrian Cultures through the Culinary Memories of (Jewish) Austrian Emigrants in the United States
Comments by Paige Newhouse (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)


12:15 p.m. – 1:15 p.m.

Lunch


1:15 – 2:00 p.m.

Artistic Interlude II

Chair: Isabel Richter (GHI Washington Pacific Office at UC Berkeley)

Stephanie Rotem (Ariel University): The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in a Pita
Comments by Amy Millet (University of Kansas)


2:00 – 2:30 p.m.

Closing Round


3:00 – 4:00 p.m.

Campus Tour with Gia White, UC Berkeley (optional): Black Lives at Cal: Black History Walking Tour.


5:30 p.m.

Dinner (self pay)

Comal Restaurant


Organizer & Chairs
David Do Paço

French Institute, Villa Albertine, San Francisco

Deniz Göktürk

Deniz Göktürk holds a Ph.D. from Freie Universität Berlin and is a professor in the Department of German at the University of California, Berkeley, also affiliated with the Department of Film & Media. She works on cultural and media studies with a focus on moving images, documentary forms, polyglott literature, and theories of migration, social interaction, and aesthetic intervention in a global horizon. Her publications include a book on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture, translations from Turkish literature, numerous articles and edited volumes on transnational migration, culture, and cinema. She is co-editor of The German Cinema Book (BFI 2002, expanded 2nd edition 2019); Germany in Transit: Nation and Migration 1955-2005 (Berkeley: University of California Press 2007); Transit Deutschland: Debatten zu Nation und Migration (2011); Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe? (Routledge 2010); Komik der Integration: Grenzpraktiken der Gemeinschaft (2019). Her book Framing Migration: Seven Takes on Movement and Borders is forthcoming from De Gruyter. She is also working on a project on Poetic Truth in Documentary Cinema and has been co-curating film series on Documentary Voices at BAMPFA. She is co-founder and concept coordinator of TRANSIT, the UC Berkeley German Department’s electronic journal (since 2005).

Maren Möhring

Maren Möhring is a cultural historian at the institute for cultural studies at Universität Leipzig. Her research interests are gender and body history as well as the history of consumerism and migration.

Isabel Richter

Isabel Richter is a deputy director of German Historical Institute Washington and the head of Pacific Office in Berkeley. She is a historian of modern German history. In her first monograph, she explored gender relations in the political resistance in Nazi Germany before World War II. Her second book focused on how (predominantly white and middle-class) men and women in the German speaking countries grappled with aging, the impermanence and the end of life in the long 19th century. She is currently working on a research project on youth and countercultures in the global 1960s. Her publications include Hochverratsprozesse als Herrschaftspraxis. Männer und Frauen vor dem Volksgerichtshof 1934-1939, Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot Münster 2001; Der phantasierte Tod. Bilder und Vorstellungen vom Lebensende im 19. Jahrhundert, Campus Frankfurt/M. 2010 and Mapping Modern Rejuvenation (co-edited 2020 with Kristine Alexander and Mischa Honeck).

Fernanda Sada Jiménez

Fernanda Sada Jiménez is a historian interested in the convergence of food history, sensory history, and the history of urban space and practices, with a particular focus on Germany, Austria, and Mexico during the 19th century. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also a member of the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in History from the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Daniele Valisena

Daniele Valisena is a historian whose work explores the connections between environmental history, migration studies, and the history of science. He’s the recipient of the 2025/26 Visiting Tandem Program in the History of Migration based at the German Historical Institute’s Pacific Office in Berkeley. Currently, he is working on a research project exploring animal history, environmental history, and urban modernization in Progressive Era San Francisco and New York City. Daniele earned his PhD in the history of science, technology, and the environment from KTH – Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. During his studies, he was part of ENHANCE, Europe’s first ITN – Marie Sklodowska-Curie Doctoral Training Network in environmental humanities. After his PhD, Daniele worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Liège, Belgium, on the ERC-funded project The Body Societal. There, he focused on the role of genetics and animal husbandry during fascist Italy.

Participants
Hannah Beilharz

Hannah Beilharz is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, artistic researcher, and curator based between Naarm (Melbourne), Australia, and Berlin, Germany. She recently completed a long-term creative research project (2021–2024) in Lucerne, Switzerland, and Berlin, as part of a Master of Art in Public Spheres at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and the Master of Spatial Strategies program at Weissensee Kunsthochschule. Her work makes space for silenced voices from the so-called margins through storytelling, interweaving images, poetry, violence, and personal and ancestral memory. She works with diverse media including sound, video, performance, textile, poetry, and speculative fiction, addressing ecological grief, the loss of homelands, and belonging within the climate crisis. Her practice explores creative approaches to imagining futures in times of collapse and disaster beyond hope. Her work has been shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions and public projects across Australia and Europe, and she is currently involved in several international collective projects.

Amy Carney

Amy Carney is an associate professor of history at Pennsylvania State University, the Behrend College. She teaches courses on modern European and German history, including Fascism and National Socialism, the history of the Holocaust, and World War II. Her research, including her 2018 book Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS, focuses on family life during the Third Reich. Her current project is a microhistory of two Jewish families—one from Cologne, the other from Vienna—and their experiences living in and emigrating from Nazi Germany before World War II. She is also co-authoring a cookbook based on Central European recipes originally published in The Christian Science Monitor.

Tim Corbett

Tim Corbett is a historian, writer, and translator based in Vienna, Austria. He is the author of a monograph and more than thirty essays on Jewish history, the Holocaust, exile, and cultures of memory in modern Austria. He has also edited several volumes in Austrian studies. Corbett has held visiting research and teaching positions in Austria, Germany, and the United States, most recently at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Austrian Society for the Study of Exile and the Editorial Board of the Journal of Austrian Studies, and previously sat on the Executive Board of the Austrian Studies Association. In 2021, his work was recognized with the Michael Mitterauer Prize for Social, Cultural, and Economic History from the University of Vienna and the City of Vienna Prize for Outstanding Achievements in the Humanities.

Yaatsil Guevara González

Yaatsil Guevara González is a junior professor of Migration and the Americas at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies, Germany. She has previously worked at the Department of Anthropology and African Studies (Mainz), the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence, and the Center for InterAmerican Studies (Bielefeld). She was a fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Center for Advanced Latin American Studies (Costa Rica). Specializing in refugee studies, displacement, and the anthropology of everyday life, her work includes (Un)Settling Place: Diverse and Divergent Place-Making of People on the Move (forthcoming), Material Culture and (Forced) Migration (UCL, 2022), and Report Global (Fisherman, 2023).

Razak Khan

Razak Khan is a research fellow in global history at the Department of History, Free University of Berlin. He has edited special issues for the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (2015) and Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (2020). His book Minority Pasts: Locality, Emotions and Belonging in Rampur was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Most recently, he co-edited Nodes of Translation: Rethinking Intellectual History between Modern India and Germany (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2024). He is a founding member of the Berlin Diaspora Inter-Asia Collective and is currently co-editing an anthology of Asian writings on food, migration, and belonging in Berlin.

Claudia Kreklau

Claudia Kreklau is an associate lecturer in modern European history at the University of St Andrews. Her forthcoming book Making Modern Eating, published in the German Historical Institute’s Studies in German History series (Berghahn Books, 2025), examines how German households invented modern eating practices. She has published on migration, Enlightenment science, spatial history, and gender anxiety. Kreklau is the recipient of several awards, including the Sussman Prize in Science (2019), the Parker-Schmitt Dissertation Prize (2018), and the German Studies Association Essay Prize (2017). Her work has been supported by the Carnegie Trust, Wellcome Trust, Thyssen Foundation, Royal Historical Society, and the Central European History Society.

Amy Millet

Amy Millet studies the intersection of culinary culture and global imperialism in the Habsburg Empire. Her research explores how culinary writings, advertisements, and food exhibitions helped construct Austrian cultural identity between 1870 and the 1930s. She focuses on how imported foods and foreign tastes entered Austrian households and culinary repertoires during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her work situates Austrian food culture within European and global contexts.

Gökhan Mura

Gökhan Mura is an associate professor of design in the Department of Visual Communication Design at Izmir University of Economics. He holds degrees in industrial design and visual communication design, including a PhD in industrial design. His research interests span various design disciplines, with a focus on the narrative capabilities of design, technology, and material culture. Currently, he is researching migration and design, including transnational objects, migrant gifts, migrant spaces, and the material manifestations of migration narratives in post-migrant societies.

Paige Newhouse

Paige Newhouse is a doctoral candidate in her seventh year in the History PhD program at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, titled “Revisiting the Right to Stay: Vietnamese Migrants in Postwar Germany, 1978–2000,” examines how the Cold War shaped Vietnamese migration to Germany across the Iron Curtain. She argues that following the Cold War’s end, Germans had to rethink frameworks of humanitarian protection and labor migration as Vietnamese migrants challenged traditional categories of migrant identity.

Stephanie Rotem

Stephanie Shosh Rotem is an architect, architectural historian, and scholar of museum studies. She earned her PhD in the Program for Interdisciplinary Arts at Tel Aviv University, and her dissertation was published as Constructing Memory: Architectural Narratives of Holocaust Museums (Peter Lang, 2013). She formerly headed the Museum Studies Program at Tel Aviv University and has taught courses in arts and Holocaust studies at the University of Haifa, UC Berkeley (2019–21), and the University of Virginia (2018–19). Currently, she is a faculty member at the School of Architecture at Ariel University in Israel, where she teaches architectural and art history and theory. Her research focuses on Israeli and Jewish museums and architecture.

Magdalena Suerbaum

Magdalena Suerbaum is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for Gender Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. Her work focuses on forced displacement, gender, legal precarity, and belonging, with a particular interest in parenting and intergenerational knowledge among Syrians in Turkey and Germany. From 2017 to 2021, she held a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen. She received her PhD in Gender Studies from SOAS, University of London, in 2018. Suerbaum is co-editor of three recent special issues (in Ethnic and Racial StudiesJournal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and Citizenship Studies) and the author of Masculinities and Displacement in the Middle East: Syrian Refugees in Egypt (I.B. Tauris, 2020).