Stephanie Skier is a student in the dual-degree program in World and International History. Her master's thesis project, "The International 'Girl Trade' in Imperial Germany, 1880s-1914: Universalizing the Policing of Sexual Commerce?", traces the history of the category "Maedchenhandel" (girl trade) and the framing of prostitution as a transnational migration issue that called for an international response. Her research interests include 19th- and 20th-century Central and Eastern European history; gender and sexuality; migration and mobility; Prussian/German empire, imperialism, eastern settlement, colonialism, "cultural space," and extraterritorial projections; international law; state sovereignty, bodily sovereignty, and the body/person of the monarch and of the citizen-/subject; grey economies and criminalized trade networks in the history of globalizations; international transit nodes such as ports and train hubs; borders and border policing. She graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in Social Studies and Studies of Women/Gender/Sexuality and wrote the summa-grade undergraduate thesis "Rational Kitchens': How Scientific Kitchen Designs Reconfigured Domestic Space and Subjectivity from the White City to the New Frankfurt." As a former Fulbright Fellow in Berlin, she researched housewives associations and female homosexual publications during the Weimar Republic, and their respective mobilizations of ideas of "female friendship" and vernacular science. She is grateful to receive support from Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowships for summer 2013 and academic year 2013-14 in Polish, the Harriman Institute Summer Language Fellowship, and the University of Pittsburgh Summer Language Institute Fellowship.
