Marcia C. Schenck

Marcia C. Schenck is an Assistant Professor (Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin) in Global History at Freie Universität Berlin. She joined the faculty in 2018 after a year as Postdoctoral Fellow at re:workat Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She holds a PhD and MA in history from Princeton University, an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in International Relations from Mount Holyoke College. She was a visiting scholar at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in Maputo in 2014.

At Princeton University, Schenck defended her dissertation titled Socialist Solidarities and Their Afterlives: Histories and Memories of Angolan and Mozambican Migrants in the German Democratic Republic, 1975-2015 in September 2017. This social history draws on oral histories of Angolan and Mozambican men and women who worked across various industries in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the 1980s. Framed by the chronology of the migrants’ life histories, the project discusses the reasons for leavening and returning home, lived experiences regarding production and consumption, integration and exclusion in the GDR, and the present-day legacies of the migration processes in Angola and Mozambique. Schenck is currently transforming her dissertation into a book and publishing on related projects about African migrations during the Cold War period.

Schenck’s latest research project The African Refugee Regime in Global Perspective 1963-1984traces the historic genesis of the OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa within the context of debates about decolonization, pan-Africanism, and the Cold War in Africa.This political and legal history analyzes the history of international organizations such as the UNHCR and the OAU with regard to the formulation of the African refugee regime. The implications of the convention in question, however, cannot be understood without taking into account the formalization of a European refugee regime after the Second World War or considering the discussions about a Latin American regional refugee complex in the early 1980s.

Schenck is currently a member of working groups focusing on critical migration studies and refugee and forced migration studies in Africa in the Migration Laboratory (Labor Migration) and the Network Refugee Studies (Netzwerk Fluchtforschung). Moreover, she is collaborating with Professor Jeremy Adelman and Princeton’s Global History Lab in providing access to higher education in the humanities to refugee learners around the world. Furthermore, she is organizing an international workshop titled Rethinking Refuge: Processes of Refuge Seeking in Africa and beyond to be held in Berlin in June 2019, funded by the Forum Transnationale Studien.

Originally from Germany, Marcia C. Schenck has gained research experience in South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Namibia, Botswana, the US, Great Britain, Switzerland, Germany, and Portugal. She complimented her academic experience as Mercator Fellow on International Affairs working for international organizations on global labor migration in Germany, Argentina, and Indonesia.

The history of migration and refugees, labor, education, development, and international organizations, oral history, African history, and global history are among Schenck’s research and teaching interests.