Albert Manke

Albert Manke works on Latin American and Global History at the University of California at Berkeley as a research fellow at the Pacific Regional Office of the German Institute of History in Washington. He is part of the project Interaction and Knowledge in the Pacific Region: Entanglements and Disentanglements which is part of the collaborative project Knowledge Unbound of the Max Weber Foundation. He specialises in trans-Pacific and inter-American entanglements and Cold War history and works mainly on Cuba, Mexico, the Philippines and California. He is particularly interested in the nexus between migration and dynamics of exclusion and discrimination, as well as histories of resistance and social movements in the Americas, with a focus on action, empowerment and mutual aid. He has been a visiting professor in Cuba and the United States and has worked at the German universities of Cologne and Bielefeld, as well as giving lectures and seminars in Spain, Great Britain, Cuba, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, China and other countries. In Cologne he served as co-director of the University of Cologne Forum Ethnicity as a Political Resource: Perspectives from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe and as senior researcher at the Global South Studies Center; in Bielefeld he extended his research to the hemispheric level as a researcher for the project The Americas as a Space of Intertwinements at the Center for Inter-American Studies. His first book, El Pueblo Cubano en Armas (2014, published in German) shows how different sectors of Cuban society mobilised to defend the Cuban revolution of 1959. His subsequent publications focused on migrants and Chinese descendants in the Americas and their experiences of exclusion, belonging, conviviality, participation and resilience.