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Brian Van Wyck
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Occupation
Assistant Professor
Contact
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Fine Arts Building, 1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore MD 21250
United States
ABOUT
I specialize in the history of migration from Turkey to West Germany. My current research focuses on how West Germans and Turks grappled with the permanent presence of Turkish guest workers, refugees, and their families in West Germany from the 1960s onward. This project aims to show how policies and practices on teachers and imams from Turkey charged with seeing to the educational and spiritual needs of West Germany’s largest immigrant population reflected as well as shaped notions of race, Islam, and national belonging in both countries. I am also interested in Islamic religious instruction in German schools, Turkish Islamic associations in Germany, and the construction by German charities, churches, unions, and migrant organizations of Ausländerarbeit (“work with foreigners”) as a disciplinary category.
Discipline
History
Sub Areas
Turkish Studies
19th-21st Centuries
Transnationalism
Education
Islamic Studies
Geographic Areas of Interest
Turkey
Europe
Specialties
Turkish Teachers & Imams In (West) Germany
Comparative Turkish Migration
Turkish Diaspora Policy
Languages
German (advanced)
Turkish (advanced)
Education
PhD | 2019 | History | Michigan State University
MA | 2012 | Nationalism Studies | Central European University
BA | 2007 | History | Williams College
Abstracts
“Not far away in the Orient”: Orientalism, Islam, and integration policies in West Germany, 1979-1984