Carleton PhD candidate Christine Whitehouse has won a doctoral grant from the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. The grant, tenable at the Freie Universität Berlin, was awarded for her dissertation The “Free Germany” Movement: Jewish Exiles in Transnational Perspective, 1938-1961.
Whitehouse’s dissertation examines the experiences of German communists of Jewish descent in exile in Mexico City during the Second World War and explores their experiences of alienation upon their return to the German Democratic Republic after 1949. The grant will give Whitehouse the opportunity to conduct research in Berlin and area archives for 10 months.
The project has benefited enormously from Whitehouse’s engagement with Carleton faculty members from several departments, including Jennifer Evans, James Casteel, Deidre Butler and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera. This interdisciplinary dialogue has been vital in shaping her project’s transnational approach.
“It is a real coup for Carleton to have garnered a spot in the program,” said Evans. “Christine is a fantastic student.”
“One of the greatest opportunities that the Berlin Program affords fellows is the chance to network with other doctoral candidates and postdocs from multiple disciplines in a biweekly colloquium, and with European scholars from specific fields working in one of Berlin’s many research institutions,” said Whitehouse. “Carleton has a strong cohort of Germanists working on interesting topics in post ’45 cultural history. I’m happy to see the department garner recognition in such an important competition.”
Whitehouse is also a SSHRC Joseph Armand Bombardier winner and was an Auschwitz Jewish Centre Fellow in 2011. In 2012, she was handpicked for a workshop for technically advanced PhD students and postdocs sponsored by New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, titled The Experiences of Modern European Jews: National, Transnational, and Comparative Perspectives. Whitehouse first came to Carleton in 2010 to complete her MA under the supervision of Evans after turning down an offer from Cambridge University.
About the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies: The Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies promotes a new generation of young North American scholars with specialized knowledge of modern and contemporary Germany and Europe. The program supports scholars in all social science and humanities disciplines, including historians working on the period since the mid-18th century. Fellowships are awarded for doctoral dissertation research as well as postdoctoral research which leads to completion of a monograph. The Berlin Program is administered in partnership with the German Studies Association (GSA). Click here for more information on the program.
–Story written by Chris Cline
Thursday, March 14, 2013 in Grad Student Research, News
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