The Team

Madeleine Dungy studied history at the University of Wisconsin, Oxford University, and Harvard University. Her doctoral work traced the history of trade politics in the League of Nations. In Internal Fortress, her research focuses on the new organizational networks that developed around the EEC Commission to implement the free movement policy and the way that they reconfigured relations between state and non-state actors in national migration politics. These organizational changes also corresponded to a substantive shift in national migrant administration from admission at the border towards integration and family welfare behind the border. 

Nhi Yen Le is doing her PhD research focusing on Vietnamese migrants restaurants in France during 1954-1975, with particular attention to how new EEC regulations on freedom of movement and establishment may have shaped the French government's different policies toward EEC and non-EEC immigrants in the restaurant sector. She completed her Bachelor's degree in Painting at Vietnam University of Fine Arts and her Master's degree in Comparative History at the History Department at the Central European University, Austria.

Selina Breitbach completed her interdisciplinary Master's degree in Culture and Economy, specialising in German history, at the University of Mannheim in 2024. Since early 2025, she has been a PhD candidate in the Department of Historical Sciences at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her doctoral thesis focuses on German migration history in the post-war period. In her thesis, she examines the relationship between training programmes, national migration policies, and European regulations, as well as the role of education in migration policy. Alongside government institutions, she is investigating the involvement of trade unions, social organisations, and migrant groups in organising training programmes.