Garbi Schmidt

• Professor of Cultural Encounter Studies and a member of the inter-institutional research group on migration, Roskilde University

I am a professor of Cultural Encounter Studies and a member of the inter-institutional research group on migration at RUC. From May 2025, I will also serve as the director of studies at Cultural Encounter Studies.

My background is in religious history and Islamology (my PhD from 1998 focused on Muslim immigrant groups in Chicago), but when I was hired as a researcher at the then SFI (now VIVE) in 1999, my research moved in a direction where migration was the core focus (although I also published/publish books and articles about Muslims in Denmark). Through my work, however, I slowly became more and more aware that a combination of both a historical and anthropological approach to migration - i.e. a longue duréé approach - could form the basis for new perspectives on immigration as a phenomenon. This was an approach that I developed in my doctoral dissertation from 2015 (Nørrebro's immigration history 1885-2010) and a number of articles. This approach is also present in my book The First Ghetto from 2021 and in the book in English that I am writing in 2024-2025, supported by the Carlsberg Foundation, and which is entitled Towards a Critique of Methodological Presentism in Migration Research.

My research interests include immigration to Denmark in both the past and present, the significance of immigration for Danish cities, transnational movements, ghettoization, and the expression of Islam in Europe and North America.

• –present Professor of Cultural Encounter Studies and a member of the inter-institutional research group on migration, Roskilde University

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