In her talk, Lauren Stokes provides an insight into the social history of the 'jet age' since the 1960s. The increasing availability of air travel is a crucial part of our current era of globalisation: it has led to a boom in international travel, intensified the diasporic connections of long-distance migrants, and facilitated the growth of multinational corporations through widely dispersed communities of expatriate employees. Through a series of archetypal travellers, Stokes analyses airports and aviation as key sites for our age of unequal mobility, marked by differences of class, race and nationality.

Lauren Stokes is Associate Professor at the Northwestern University (UK) and Research Fellow at HIAS – Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study. She is a historian of modern Germany, with a particular focus on migration and race in German and European history. Her first book, Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany, examines the way that the ‘family member’ functioned as a specific category within the West German migration regime. Her current research projects deal with the history of racial profiling in Europe, the history of airports since the 1970s, and the history of bisexuality as a category ( read more).