Short Bio

I research, write, and teach about the twentieth century United States in a global context with special emphasis on human migration, science and technology, nationalism, popular culture, and public history. After growing up first in Tuscaloosa, AL, then in Frankfurt, Germany, I earned an M.A. degree at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, Germany, and a Ph.D. at the University of Kansas—both in American Studies. Before returning to graduate school for the Ph.D., I spent eight years working in the Information Technology industry as a consultant, trainer, and customer liaison. In 2014, I moved back to Alabama to join the History Department at Auburn University.

Currently, I am working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Brain Gain: Bringing Skilled Migrants to the United States. It examines the development and impact of federal policies concerning skilled migrants to the United States.

My first book, titled German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era (Yale University Press, 2015), is an interdisciplinary study based on oral histories and archival material about the immigration, integration, and memory of the German rocket experts associated with Wernher von Braun who were brought to the United States after World War II and later became famous for their contributions to NASA’s Apollo Program. You can watch a presentation of my research, read related blog posts here and here, or you can listen to a great podcast by the Southern Foodways Alliance, for which I was interviewed in 2016. If you enjoy this medium, you may also want to listen to my most recent appearance as a co-host of the podcast “Paperclip.“

German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie won the 2015 Eugene M. Emme Astronautical Literature Award from the American Astronautical Society (AAS), the 2016 Gardner-Lasser Aerospace History Literature Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) as well as an honorable mention for the Deep South Book Prize of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. I received funding for my scholarship from multiple prestigious entities, including two fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), and two fellowships funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)—one from the American Historical Association (AHA) and the other from the Society for History of Technology (SHOT).

****************************************************************************************

I can be contacted at: laney.monique(AT)gmail(DOT)com