05/11/2026
Michelle Lynn Kahn, author of Foreign in Two Homelands. Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History (Cambridge University Press), has been award the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize for first books published in 2024.
Dr. Kahn is an associate professor of history at the University of Richmond who earned her PhD at Stanford in 2018. Her interests lie in transnational history, and her book uses this approach to explore the situation of Turkish Gastarbeiter (= guest workers), Turkish citizens invited in the 1960s and 1970s to offset a labour shortage in West Germany. In the 1980s, in the face of anti-Turkish resentment within West Germany, the German government enacted a policy of paying Gastarbeiter to return to Turkey, and those who took the government up on the offer faced the stigma of being “Germanized Turks.”
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