Barbara Laubenthal
Associate Professor — PhD, University of Giessen, Germany
DAAD Adjunct Associate Professor

Contact
- E-mail: barbara.laubenthal@austin.utexas.edu
- Office: BUR 368
- Office Hours: Wednesday 12 - 1pm via zoom
- Campus Mail Code: C3300
Interests
memory studies; cultural memory and politics of memory in postwar Germany and Europe; reparation studies; immigration in Germany and Europe; marginalized groups and social rights
Biography
Barbara Laubenthal is DAAD associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to coming to UT she served as lecturer and interim professor of public administration in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Konstanz and visiting professor for migration and integration at the University of Tübingen. Her main research fields are immigration policies in Germany and Europe, cultural memory, politics of memory and reparations, and social rights for marginalized groups. Her articles have appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Migration, Comparative Migration Studies, Memory Studies and German Politics and she is the author of two monographs on German asylum policies and on protests by undocumented migrants in Europe. She has collaborated on a number of comparative European research projects on labor migration and she has been the director of the international research project Reparations for colonial soldiers in France, Great Britain and the United States. National movements and transnational dimensions, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Her new book ‘Give us justice before we die.’ Reparations for Second World War colonial veterans in the USA and in France will be published by University of Michigan Press.
Her current research project "What makes a murderer. Legal cultures and citizens' attitudes in the field of criminal justice" focuses on the influence of legal institutions and national discourses on citizens' attitudes in the field of criminal justice in Germany and the US. Although the two countries have many similarities they significantly differ regarding institutions like the death penalty, the length of sentences for violent crime, and the dominant discourses and norms on punishment, rehabilitation and retribution. The project will analyze these differences from a historical and cultural perspective. It aims at answering the question to what extent the institutions that surround us shape and determine our attitudes on pressing societal and political issues. The project is sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts' Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program. It is carried out together with undergraduate student Ksenija Angelina Braese and Professor Steffen Hillmert, Department of Sociology, University of Tübingen.
Recent publications include:
Laubenthal, Barbara and Myers, Kevin (2021). Memories of Migration. Commemoration, contestation and migrant integration in Germany and the United Kingdom. German Politics and Society. Forthcoming.
Laubenthal, Barbara (2019). Refugees Welcome? Reforms of German Asylum Policies between 2013 and 2017 and Germany's Transformation into an Immigration Country. German Politics 28 (03), 412-425.
Laubenthal, Barbara (2018). Spillover in der Migrationspolitik. Die Asylpolitik der dritten Merkel-Regierung und der Wandel Deutschlands zum Einwanderungsland, in: Zohlnhöfer, Reimut/Saalfeld, Thomas (Hg.): Zwischen Stillstand, Politikwandel und Krisenmanagement. Eine Bilanz der Regierung Merkel 2013-2017. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
Laubenthal, Barbara and Schumacher, Daniel (2018). Colonial memories and transnational mobilizations: Asia's colonial veterans and their struggle for British citizenship, c. 1980-2015, Memory Studies, online first: doi.org/10.1177/1750698018784113
Laubenthal, Barbara (2017). Labour migration in Europe: Changing policies - changing organizations - changing people (guest editor), special issue of International Migration, 55 (S1), December.
Laubenthal, Barbara (2016). Zwischen Ehre und Exil. Kolonialveteranen des Zweiten Weltkriegs in Frankreich und den USA, in: Zimmermann, Harm-Peer; Kruse, Andreas; Rentsch, Thomas (Ed.): Kulturen des Alterns: Plädoyers für ein gutes Leben bis ins hohe Alter. Campus, Frankfurt, 79-94.
Laubenthal, Barbara (2016). Political Institutions and Asylum Policies – The Case of Germany, Psychosociological Issues in Human Resource Management 4(2): 122–144
Please feel free to contact Barbara about funding opportunities for studying and researching in Germany.