Albert Manke is a historian of Latin American and Global History, specializing in transpacific and inter-American entanglements and the history of the Cold War with a focus on Cuba, Mexico, the Philippines, and California. He is particularly interested in migrant networks, exclusion and coping strategies, as well as in the agency-centered histories of resistance and social movements in the Americas. His first book, El Pueblo Cubano en Armas (2014, published in German) shows how different sectors of the Cuban society mobilized to defend the Cuban revolution of 1959 and significantly contributes to disentangling the dynamics between control exercised by the Castro government from above and agency from below. Following his subsequent research on Asian migrant groups in the Americas and on the Cold War on a more global scale, he has published articles and co-edited volumes on transnational engagements across the Pacific and the Atlantic – between Asia, the Americas, and Europe. His current research project looks at Chinese migrant networks in the Americas and places their strategies to cope with exclusion on center stage. It thus highlights their capacity of resiliency that could lead to the creation of spheres of mutual support and even conviviality in oftentimes not particularly welcoming host societies.
From 2013 to 2015, Albert Manke was the co-director of the University of Cologne Forum “Ethnicity as a Political Resource: Perspectives from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe”, funded by the German Initiative for Excellence. From 2015 to 2016, he was a Principal Investigator at the Global South Studies Center Cologne and member of its research area Citizenship and Migration. In 2016, he started working as a Postdoc in the Center for InterAmerican Studies’ project “The Americas as Space of Entanglement” at Bielefeld University. From 2017 to 2018, he conducted research at UC Berkeley as the first Postdoc Tandem Fellow in the History of Migration of the GHI’s Pacific Regional Office (PRO). In 2019, he joined GHI again at PRO Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Interaction and Knowledge in the Pacific Region: Entanglements and Disentanglements” which is part of the Max Weber Foundation’s large-scale research project “Knowledge Unbound.”
