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Monique Laney
Associate Professor of History, Auburn University
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Monique Laney
Associate Professor of History, Auburn University
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
AREAS OF TEACHING
History of Technology, Cold War, History of Popular Culture, Space History, Immigration History
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT
BIO
Monique Laney is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Auburn University. She is the author of German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past During the Civil Rights Era (Yale University Press, 2015) as well as several chapters on the history of immigration policies aimed at skilled migrants. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Brain Gain: Bringing Skilled Migrants to the United States, which examines the origins and impact of federal immigration policies favoring skilled immigrants.
EXTENDED PROFILE
Monique Laney is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Auburn University, where she teaches courses on the history of technology, space history, popular culture, and the Cold War. Her first book, German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era, published by Yale University Press in 2015, received best book awards from the American Astronautical Society and from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, as well as honorable mention for the Deep South Book Prize of the Summersell Center for the Study of the South at the University of Alabama. It is based on oral histories and focuses on the history and remembrance of the German rocket team associated with Wernher von Braun and the Apollo space program. Her more recent publications include “Skilled Migrant Workers” in The Cambridge History of Global Migrations: Volume 2: Migrations, 1800–Present, edited by Madeline Y. Hsu and Marcelo J. Borges, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, 300-318, “Give Me Your Best and Brightest: Chasing STEM workers since World War II” in Whose America? U.S. Immigration Policy since 1980, edited by María Cristina García and Maddalena Marinari, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2023, 69-90, and “Setting the Stage to Bring in the ‘Highly Skilled’: Project Paperclip and the Recruitment of German Specialists after World War II,” in A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in an Age of Restriction, 1924-1965 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2019).
RESEARCH
I am interested in understanding how policies aimed at skilled migrants impact the migrants, the societies they leave behind, and the ones they join.
As I was researching German Rocketeers in the Heart of Dixie: Making Sense of the Nazi Past during the Civil Rights Era (Yale 20215), I was fascinated by the efforts of the U.S. government to create a path to citizenship for scientists, engineers, and other technical personnel who had worked for the Nazi regime and were brought to the United States as enemy aliens following World War II. Apart from its ethical implications, the undertaking, named “Project Paperclip,” did not fit well within the immigration histories I was familiar with. So, after completing German Rocketeers, I started researching and writing about the history of policies aimed at skilled migrants. This inquiry resulted so far in three published essays and my current book project, tentatively titled Brain Gain: Bringing Skilled Migrants to the United States.
The first essay takes a closer look at how Project Paperclip fits into the context of postwar immigration policies, especially the 1952 Immigration Act. The second and third essays are overviews that take World War II as their starting point, where one focuses on the development of the U.S. preference system for skilled migrants and the other traces the global evolution of immigration systems privileging skilled migrants. Both essays frame the developments they describe in the context of today’s highly competitive global marketplace for skilled migrants. All three essays have been crucial for helping me conceptualize ideas for the book manuscript I am currently working on, which will be the first study of the longer history of U.S. federal policies offering preferential treatment for skilled migrants. It begins in the late nineteenth century, when the first federal policies aimed at skilled migrants were enacted, and ends in the 1980s, at which point the larger developments that inform today’s preference system for skilled migrants were in place.
For my next project I want to expand on what I learned about the global history of immigration policies favoring skilled migrants as I was writing my third essay. My goal is to research and compare the histories of Irish, Indian, and Israeli policies aimed at attracting skilled workers since the 1990s, when these countries’ software industries took off. I plan to explore how the three countries dealt with the already well-established global competition for skilled migrants from their different historic, geopolitical, and economic positions in the global context.
PROJECTS AND EXHIBITIONS
- Program Assistant, Lecture and Seminars Division, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution (assist in organizing 2014 Mutual Concerns of Air and Space Museums Conference), 2014
- Research assistance and rights clearance for the Earl Scruggs Center: Music & Stories from the American South through MJM Picture and Film Research, 2012
- Reviewer for proposal to screen documentary film Harvest of Empire (2011) and hold panel discussion with topic experts at the Warner Bros. Theater at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, 2012
- Participant in Smithsonian Immigration/Migration Initiative, 2011-2014
AWARDS
AHA-NASA Fellowship in Aerospace History, American Historical Association; supported by the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA), 2011-2012, A. Verville Fellowship, National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C., 2010-2011, SHOT Fellowship in the History of Space Technology, supported by NASA, 2009-2010, National Science Foundation (NSF): Science, Technology and Society Program (STS), Dissertation Improvement Grant, Project ID: 0823163, 2008-2009, Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C., Feb – July 2007
INTERVIEWS
- Interviewed for article, “Auburn astronaut, professors put historic NASA launch in perspective,” Office of Communications and Marketing, Auburn University, June 04, 2020
- Podcast co-host, “Paperclip: America’s Nazi Scientists,” Amazon Studios/L.A. Times Studios (released May/June 2020)
- Interviewed for Ripley’s Believe It or Notcast, “The Nazi Scientists Who Built America’s Space Rockets” (released March 24, 2020)
- Interviewed for newspaper article by Ralph Vartabedian, “Who got America to the moon? An unlikely collaboration of Jewish and former Nazi scientists and engineers,” Los Angeles Times, March 1, 2020
- Interviewed for documentary, Mondlandung, for Bayerischer Rundfunk, (aired July 17, 2019)
- Interviewed for documentary, Prisoners of the Moon, a UK-Canada-Ireland co-production, written by Nick Snow, directed by Johnny Gogan, and produced by Ron Goetz, 2017 (released March, 2019)
- Interviewed for “Schnitzel and the Saturn V,” Episode 42, Gravy (podcast), Southern Foodways Alliance, (aired July 28, 2016)
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