Humanities and Social Sciences

History Program

Staff Profiles

Dr Claudia Haake

Lecturer & Postrgaduate Coordinator Room: David Myers Building E134 Tel: (61 3) 9479 2054 Fax: (61 3) 9479 1942 Email: c.haake@latrobe.edu.au Qualifications: MA Johns Hopkins, PhD Bielefeld

Claudia Haake joined the History Program in second semester 2007, after having been a lecturer at the University of York (UK). She also taught at the University of Bielefeld (Germany) and the University of Cologne (Germany). Claudia has an MA from Johns Hopkins University (USA) and a PhD from the University of Bielefeld (Germany) and also held the Metcalfe Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Western Ontario (Canada). She has done research and training in the USA, Mexico, and Guatemala.

Claudia Haake's primary research interest is Native American History from the 19th century onward. She is especially interested in North American Natives from Mexico and the US. Her major areas of interest in Native American Studies are ethnicity, identity and culture. Her work for her first book has focused on identity issues in a transnational comparative framework, investigating the cases of the Mexican Yaquis and the United States Delawares. She also has compared state policies towards indigenous peoples in Mexico and the US. Rights, especially land and treaty rights are among her other foci in research and teaching and she is currently working on a study about indigenous land loss in the United States in the 19th century. She also maintains an interest in minorities in the United States as well as in the history of 20th century Guatemala.

Research Projects

‘The Roots of Identity’ (financed partially by a Kluge Fellowship at the US Library of Congress and also through a grant from the British Academy), which investigates the way American Indians have articulated their relationship to the land they traditionally lived on and also considers how changes in land tenure affected Native culture and identity.

The collection of essays Removals – Forced Migration in the Modern World (co-editor Richard Bessel) explores in comparative perspective forced mass migrations as a modern phenomenon.

Current Graduate Supervision Areas and Topics

Claudia Haake is interested in supervising in the areas of Indigenous history primarily of the Americas; Latin American history (especially Mexico and Guatemala), the history of forced migration, as well as issues related to land and identity. She is especially interested in comparative topics involving any of these areas.

Current students are working on various topics in Mexican History and that of other Latin American countries, including the history of literacy campaigning in Nicaragua and also the history of missionaries in Guatemala during the period of civil war and genocide.

In addition to topics like the ones mentioned above Claudia would welcome students working in areas of transnational and cross-cultural history especially of indigenous peoples. (At honour’s level it is generally possible to find topics which students can pursue via primary sources available in Australia, on the web or in edited forms. Sometimes this may also be possible for MA research but generally students working in such areas at the level of MA or above would be expected to spend some time abroad to conduct research.)

Research Grants

Claudia has held a Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress (2008) and has received research related funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the British Academy, several German Historical Institutes, and from the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst).