Join us for an engaging colloquium on Monday, May 19, from 16:15 to 17:45 (in person) at Freie Universität Berlin, FMI, Room A336 (Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin).

Convened by Sebastian Conrad, Michael Goebel, and Isabella Löhr, the session promises stimulating discussions in an academic setting.

We look forward to seeing you there!

About the talk:

In 1944, millions more people had been bombed by an airplane than had ever flown on one. The men who gathered that November to write the future of aviation law were in the elite group of airplane passengers, not just victims, and passengers who believed that this rapidly developing technology could also be a weapon of peace. The convention they produced upheld strong state sovereignty over airspace, laying the groundwork for the “jet age” as an age of border proliferation, as even countries that retained their shape added aerial borders at a dizzying rate. In this talk, Lauren Stokesdescribes our age of border proliferation through eight of the figures who have defined it, the passengers and non-passengers whose border crossing has defined our current era of globalization.

Lauren Stokes is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, where she teaches courses on German and European history, migration history, gender history, and the "History of the Present". She is the author of Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford 2022) and is currently co-editing (with Michelle Kahn) an edited collection titled Racism and Anti-Racism in Divided Germany. She also has ongoing research projects on the history of bisexuality, the history of right-wing environmentalism, and mobility in the jet age.

Please see our Code of Conduct that applies to all Global History Events: