Seminars 2022-23
Program for 2022–23
Fall 2022
All seminars will take place as Zoom events. We will communicate the Zoom URL for each NCGS seminar before the event via our NCGS list serve.
If you are not on this list serve, please contact the NCGS graduate assistant MADELINE JAMES (mljames6@live.unc.edu) and ask to be added the NCGS list serve or request the URL for a specific event in the weeks before the event. They will also take care of the technology of the Zoom Seminars. For our NCGS Online Seminars Etiquette, see here.
Friday, 23 September 2022
UNC Chapel Hill I 2:00 – 4:00 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome and Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN I James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
JAMES M. BROPHY I Francis H. Squire Professor of History; European Studies Director I University of Delaware, Department of History
Print Circuits and Political Dissent: Publishers in Central Europe, 1800-1870
Publishers were brokers of political communication. They presided over transnational markets of knowledge, translated new texts, launched journals and newspapers, and devised hybrid formats for consuming news. Generating broad readerships for political print, producers promoted political literacy and refashioned citizenship ideals. They furthermore drew on a long tradition of circumventing censorship to vend forbidden literature. Based on the careers of dozens of major and minor publishers over two generations, this talk casts publishers not only as merchants of print but also as political actors and intellectual midwives. Their successes and failures tell us much about nineteenth-century pathways to political modernity. The architects of a vibrant, if flawed, political public sphere, publishers illuminate both the possibilities and limitations of circulating dissent in German-speaking Central Europe.
JAMES BROPHY is Francis H. Squire Professor of History at the University of Delaware. He specializes in modern European history, particularly the social and political history of nineteenth-century Germany. He has written Capitalism, Politics, and Railroads in Prussia, 1830-1870 (1998) and Popular Culture and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800-1850 (2007) as well as co-edited Perspectives from the Past: Sources in Western Civilization (1998; 7th ed., 2020) and the forthcoming Vormärzliche Verleger zwischen Zensur, Buchmarkt und Lesepublikum (2023). He is the former president of the Central European History Society and a current member of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe‘s advisory board.
Comment: JAKOB NORBERG I Professor and Chair I Duke University, Department of German Studies
Co-Conveners: Duke, Department of History and Department of German Studies, UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History and Department of German & Slavic Languages
Friday, 21 October 2022
UNC Chapel Hill I 2:00 – 4:00 pm I Zoom Seminar
Moderation:
TERESA WALCH | Assistant Professor of Modern European History I University North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of History
THOMAS PEGELOW KAPLAN | Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History I University of Colorado Boulder, Department of History
NCGS Series “CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONS” Roundtable:
“Historikerstreit 2.0.”? The German Debate about the Holocaust, Colonialism & Genocide
Over the past two decades, scholars, among them many historians, have been debating the relationships among the Holocaust, colonialism, and other genocides. In May 2021, Dirk Moses, then UNC’s Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History, injected renewed energy into these debates with the publication of his article “The German Catechism” in Geschichte der Gegenwart. The media response to this article first inside and later also outside Germany ranged from polemical rejection to nuanced support. Some observers even called this debate the “Historikerstreit 2.0.” More than a year later, this roundtable with American and German experts will take stock of the debate and reflect on intentions, positions, and possible conclusions.
Roundtable Participants:
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- A. DIRK MOSES I Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in International Relations at the City College of New York, CUNY, Department of Political Sciences
- A. DIRK MOSES I Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in International Relations at the City College of New York, CUNY, Department of Political Sciences
A. Dirk Moses is the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Chair in International Relations at the City College of New York, CUNY, Department of Political Sciences. He researches different aspects of genocide. Before coming to City, he was the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His first monograph, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past, was published in 2007. His latest book, entitled The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, appeared in 2021.
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- ALON CONFINO | Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
Alon Confino is Pen Tishkach Chair of Holocaust Studies, professor of History and Judaic Studies, and Director of the Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on the theory and practice of writing history displayed in particular in the topics of memory, culture, and nationhood. His most recent books include Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (2012); and A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (2014).
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- ZOÉ SAMUDZI I Research and Teaching Fellow at the Center for Social Equity and Inclusion and Assistant Professor in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design
- ZOÉ SAMUDZI I Research and Teaching Fellow at the Center for Social Equity and Inclusion and Assistant Professor in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design
Zoé Samudzi is a Research and Teaching Fellow at the Center for Social Equity and Inclusion and Assistant Professor in Photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. She is also a Research Associate with the Center for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC) at the University of Johannesburg and a member of the advisory committee for the Center for Medicine, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Cedars-Sinai. Her research engages the Ovaherero and Nama genocide, and colonial visualities. She is the co-author of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (2018).
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- STEFANIE SCHÜLER-SPRINGORUM I Director and Professor, Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin and Co-Director of the Selma-Stern-Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg
- STEFANIE SCHÜLER-SPRINGORUM I Director and Professor, Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin and Co-Director of the Selma-Stern-Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg
Stefanie Schüler-Springorum is the Director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the TU Berlin and Co-Director of the Selma-Stern-Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg; since 2020 she is also the Director of the Berlin branch of the Center for Research on Social Cohesion. Her main fields of research are Jewish, German, and Spanish History. Recent publications include Football and Discrimination. Antisemitism and beyond (edited with Pavel Brunssen, 2021); Emotionen und Antisemitismus: Geschichte—Literatur—Theorie (edited with Jan Süselbeck, 2021); and Perspektiven deutsch-jüdischer Geschichte: Geschlecht und Differenz (2014).
Co-Conveners: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, Center for European Studies and Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, and Duke Department of History
Friday, 18 November 2022
UNC Chapel Hill I 2:00 – 4:00 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome and Moderation: MADELINE JAMES I PhD Candidate I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
TILL KNOBLOCH I PhD Candidate | UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
The ‘Manufactured Crisis’: The Outbreak of World War II in Europe
Claus von Stauffenberg once described the inner circle of Nazi leaders as consisting solely of “opportunists and psychopaths” and indeed rarely had a war been instigated by a more peculiar lot of people. Fanatics, amateurs, yes-men and the inevitable “alte Kämpfer” – they all gathered around their leader at the Berghof where Hitler’s endless monologues and absurd mannerisms created a conspiracy-prone bubble that reason could not penetrate. Drawing from my dissertation research, the presentation will demonstrate how those personal factors shaped the Third Reich’s foreign policy and ultimately the outbreak of World War II. It will thus become clear that Hitler’s perceptions and ideas, his decisions and actions, were not the result of calculated diplomacy but the product of a system designed to appeal to the personal habits of one man.
TILL KNOBLOCH is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, spending the academic year 2022/23 in Berlin as a fellow of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. His research interests focus on International History, Modern German and European History, Hitler, the Third Reich, and the Second World War, as well as Causes and Outbreaks of Wars. His dissertation, “The ‘Manufactured Crisis’: The Outbreak of World War II in Europe,” examines the diplomatic crisis at the eve of the Second World War from an international perspective with a particular emphasis on Polish sources.
Comment: CHAD BRYANT I Associate Professor of History I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
Co-Conveners: Duke and UNC-CHAPEL HILL, Departments of History
Spring 2023
Friday, 27 January 2023
UNC Chapel Hill I 2:00 – 4:00 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome and Moderation: ANDREA SINN I O’Briant Developing Professor and Associate Professor of History | Elon University, Department of History & Geography
Introduction of the Prize Winner: THOMAS PEGELOW KAPLAN I Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History | University of Colorado, Department of History
Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize Winner for Advanced Graduate Students in 2022:
YANARA SCHMACKS I Doctoral Candidate I The Graduate Center, City University of New York, Department of History
“We always did this for our children”: Motherhood in the GDR between Socialism and Opposition
The presentation explores how GDR women dealt with motherhood and thereby, in conversation with and sometimes opposition to the state, renegotiated socialist modernity. East German women writers drew up alternative socialist versions of maternity, framing the mother-child relationship as a platonic partnership between mother and child and, in contrast to their Western counterparts, deemphasizing the bodily elements of motherhood. These positions toward motherhood and children were often politically in line with culturally hegemonic ideas about the socialist family that were promoted by the state. Yet, in the 1980s, motivated by intense maternal concern for their children in the face of growing Cold War tensions and environmental destruction, GDR women’s activists tried to actively intervene at the state level to improve the future of their children, thereby becoming involved in oppositional activities and ultimately contributing to bringing about the Wende.
YANARA SCHMACKS is a PhD candidate in Modern European History at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. She is working on a dissertation titled “Reproductive Nation: German Motherhood, Erotics, and Ecology between East and West,” exploring how the maternal served as a space for the renegotiation of both the German past as well as the East-West divide and reunification. Her research was published in Central European History and in Psychoanalysis and History. She is currently a doctoral fellow at the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin.
Comments:
DONNA HARSCH I Professor of History I Carnegie Mellon University, Department of History
JAMES CHAPPEL I Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History I Duke University, Department of History
Co-Conveners: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, Center for European Studies, Duke Department of History
PDF of flyer
Friday, 17 February 2023
UNC Chapel Hill I 2:00 – 4:00 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome and Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN | James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History I University North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of History
NCGS Series “CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONS” Roundtale:
#IchbinHanna: Gender, Diversity and the German Academic System
Under the hashtag #IchBinHanna, academics in Germany started a campaign against the German Law on Fixed-Term Contracts in Higher Education and Research in the summer of 2021. This campaign responded to a video entitled “Ich bin Hanna” by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which attempted to explain why fixed-term contracts are necessary. The video justifies with the argument that competition is needed in academia, and that a university system without tenure track works untenured scholars to the point of burn-out and exploits them for unpaid teaching. Only full professors get tenure. What the ministry, politicians, and many university leaders fail to see is that the lack of a tenure track causes not only the miserable working conditions of many young academics, but also contributes to the continuing discrimination of women and a lack of diversity in academia. This roundtable will discuss with a focus on history and cultural studies the questions of how the current structures and culture of the German academic system contribute to a discrimination of women, young scholars, and academics with a diverse background, while also asking which reforms might be necessary.
Roundtable Participants:
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- MURIEL GONZÁLEZ ATHENAS I Postdoctoral Research Associate (German Research Foundation) I Ruhr University Bochum
MURIEL GONZÁLEZ ATHENAS is a postdoctoral research associate at University of Innsbruck, after several years at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Barcelona at Universidad de Barcelona and Universitat Pompeo Fabra. She has a PhD in History on the topic of Labor and Gender (2010), and since 2018 she is working on her habilitation titled “Maps of Europe in the Early Modern Period: Techniques of Production.” Her most recent publication include Popularisierungen von Geschlechterwissen seit der Vormoderne. Konzepte und Analysen (ed. with Falko Schnicke, 2020); Zwischen Raum und Zeit Zwischenräumliche Praktiken in den Kulturwissenschaften (ed. with Monika Frohnapfel-Leis, 2022).
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- SEBASTIAN KUBON | Research Associate in the Field of Science Policy of the Green Party of the, Bavarian Parliament
SEBASTIAN KUBON was research associate at the University of Hamburg. In the summer 2022 he started to work for the Green Party in the Bavarian parliament in the field of science policy. His main fields of research are Medieval and Early Modern History, Digital and Public History and the Didactics of Historical-Political Education. His recent publications include Die Außenpolitik des Deutschen Ordens unter Hochmeister Konrad von Jungingen (1393-1407) (2016); and #IchBinHanna: Prekäre Wissenschaft in Deutschland (with Amrei Bahr and Kristin Eichhorn, 2022). He hopes to complete his habilitation on Public History and Medieval History in 2023.
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- MARY LINDEMANN I Professor Emerita | University of Miami, Department of History and former AHA President
- MARY LINDEMANN I Professor Emerita | University of Miami, Department of History and former AHA President
MARY LINDEMANN is Professor Emerita in the Department of History at the University of Miami. Her fields of research include early modern German, Dutch, and Flemish history as well as medical history in the early modern world. She was president of the American Historical Association in 2020 and president of the German Studies Association in 2017–2018. Her most recent book publications include: Liaisons dangereuses: Sex, Law, and Diplomacy in the Age of Frederick the Great (2006) and The Merchant Republics: Amsterdam, Antwerp, and Hamburg, 1648-1790 (2015). Currently she is writing “The Fractured Lands: Northern Germany in an Age of War and its Aftermath, 1648-1721.”
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- SYLVIA PALETSCHEK I Professor of History and and Vice Rector for University Culture | Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg
SYLVIA PALETSCHEK is Professor of History at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, Department of History and Vice Rector for University Culture. Her fields of research include women’s and gender history, history of universities, memory culture and public history, and the gender history of historiography. Her most recent English book publications include Popular Historiographies in the 19th and 20th Century (ed., 2011); The Gender of Memory. Cultures of Remembrance in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe (ed. with Sylvia Schraut, 2008).
- SYLVIA PALETSCHEK I Professor of History and and Vice Rector for University Culture | Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg
Co-Conveners: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History and Department of German & Slavic Languages, Center for European Studies, Duke Department of History
PDF of the Flyer
Friday, 31 March 2023
UNC Chapel Hill I 2:00 – 4:00 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome and Moderation: TERESA WALCH I Assistant Professor of Modern European History | University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Department of History
PAUL JASKOT I Professor I Duke University, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
From an Integrated to an Intersecting History: Digital and Analog Analysis of Architecture in Nazi Occupied Krakow
Understanding the role of buildings in German-occupied Krakow cannot easily be connected to the systemic digital mapping and question of genocide necessary for understanding the war in Europe. The two questions not only operate at different scales, but also involve archival information of different substance, and (digital) methods with different approaches. At the core of this disconnect is the problem of working through the real intersection between culture and genocide, individual experience and systemic oppression, or the materiality of the built environment and the abstraction of the political-economic scale of the Nazi occupation of Europe. This presentation will show how we are currently using modeling of built spaces based on archival sources for analyzing building in occupied Krakow. At the same time, we will talk about the relationship between individual Jewish and non-Jewish victims in the spaces of genocide. Our goal, though, is to lay out how we might think about the approaches of digital visualization and the history of Nazi Germany together.
PAUL JASKOT is Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University. He also the Co-Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab. His scholarly work focuses on the political history of Nazi art and architecture as well as its postwar cultural impact. His most recent book publications include The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (2012), and New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Social History, Representation, Theory (with Alexandra Garbarini, 2018).
Comment: BARRY TRACHTENBERG I Associate Professor, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History I Wake Forest University, Department of History
Co-Conveners: Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, Departments of History and UNC-Chapel Hill, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies
PDF of the Flyer
Friday, 14 April 2023
UNC Chapel Hill I 2:00 – 4:00 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome and Moderation: ANDREA SINN I O’Briant Developing Professor and Associate Professor of History | Elon University, Department of History & Geography
ADAM R. SEIPP I Professor of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in the College of Arts & Scieces I Texas A&M University
Amis: German Society and the US Army, 1945-1995
During the Cold War, more than 16 million Americans lived and worked in the Federal Republic of Germany as military personnel, dependents, or civilian employees. This massive and long-lasting engagement between a foreign army and the population of a sovereign state had important implications for both. Historians have explored the impact of foreign forces on consumption patterns, social movements, and youth culture in Germany, but there has been little attention paid to their role in shaping politics and political culture. My talk, part of a book project, will explore the lived experience of German communities that existed alongside, and among, the U.S. Army. Scholars need to better integrate the history of foreign military forces, and particularly the Americans, into the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.
ADAM R. SEIPP is Professor of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas A&M University. He earned his PhD at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill in 2005.His main field of research are German history, the European history of war and society, and transnational history. He is the author or editor of several books, including Strangers in the Wild Place: Refugees, Americans, and a German Town, 1945–1952 (2013), Modern Germany in Transatlantic Perspective (ed. with Michael Meng, 2017), and The Berlin Airlift and the Making of the Cold War (ed. with John Schuessler and Thomas D. Sullivan, 2022).
Comment: ELISABETH PILLER I Juniorprofessor of Transatlantic and North American History I Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Department of History
Co-Conveners: Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, Departments of History
PDF of the Flyer
Fall 2021 and Spring 2022
Because of the Covid-19-pandemic, we will continue to hold the NCGS Seminars via Zoom in 2021-22.
We will communicate the Zoom URL for each NCGS seminar before the event via our NCGS list serve.
If you are not on this list serve please contact the NCGS organizers KEVIN J. HOEPER (kjhoeper@live.unc.edu) and KENNETH ALARCÓN NEGY (kennethalarconnegy@unc.edu) and ask them to be added this list serve or request the URL for the specific event. The NCGS organizers will take care of the technology of the Zoom Seminars.
For our NCGS Online Seminar Etiquette click here.
Fall 2021
PDF of the Fall 2021 program overview
Friday, 24 September 2021
UNC Chapel Hill I 2:00 – 4:00 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome and Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN I James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
Book Discussion Roundtable together with “H-German”
Introduction: JASPER HEINZEN I Review Editor of H-German, Senior Lecturer I University of York, Department of History and MATTHEW UNANGST I Review Editor of H-German, Assistant Professor I SUNY Oneonta, Department of History
HELMUT WALSER SMITH I Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History; Professor of German Studies, Vanderbilt University, Department of History
Germany – A Nation in Its Time. Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500–2000
This book shows how the concept of the German nation developed and changed over half a millennium, demonstrating that nationalism was only one possible way of imagining the nation. Using evidence from maps and literature, material culture and high politics, this book precisely delineates constantly altering constellations of national imaginings and charts epistemological ruptures between chronologically distinct and essentially different ways of defining the nation. Modern nationalism is part of this larger story, but only a part, and one, moreover, with both productive and extremely destructive dimensions to it. The book also suggests that while Germany has not left the age of nationalism, it has made considerable progress in this direction, the partial successes of right-wing populism notwithstanding. For this reason, it makes sense to speak of the German nation before, during, and after nationalism.
HELMUT WALSER SMITH is the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. From 2005-2008, he was Director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt. His recent book publications include: Germany. A Nation in its Time. Before, During, and After Nationalism (2020); The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, editor (2011); and The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (2008).
Comments:
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- TERENCE MCINTOSH I Associate Professor I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
Is Associate Professor at the UNC Chapel Hill History Department. He is specialist of early modern Germany, especially its social, political, religious, and economic history in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His current book project is titled “Disciplining the Parish: Godly Order, Enlightenment, and the Lutheran Clergy in Germany, 1517–1806.”
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- JOHN BREUILLY I Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity I London School of Economics, Department of Government
- JOHN BREUILLY I Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity I London School of Economics, Department of Government
Is Professor of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the Department of Government of the London School of Economics. His expertise lies in modern German history and the comparative history of modern Europe. He most recently edited The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (2013), and he published a second edition of Nineteenth-Century Germany: Politics, Culture, and Society 1780-1918 (2020).
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- KONRAD H. JARAUSCH I Lurcy Professor of European Civilization I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
Is the Lurcy Professor of European Civilization at UNC Chapel Hill. He is an expert of modern German history and the comparative history of modern Europe. More recently, he has been concerned with the problem of interpreting twentieth-century German history in general. His most recent books are: Broken Lives. How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century (2018), and Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century (2015).
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- EVE ROSENHAFT I Professor Emerita of German Historical Studies I University of Liverpool, Department of Languages, Cultures and Film
- EVE ROSENHAFT I Professor Emerita of German Historical Studies I University of Liverpool, Department of Languages, Cultures and Film
Is Professor of German Historical Studies at the University of Liverpool. Her fields of research are German and European social and cultural history between 1720 and 1960, with particular emphasis on Romani studies, Holocaust studies, memory studies, women’s and gender history, Black and critical race studies, and the history of colonialism. Her most recent books include: Mnemonic Solidarity: Global Interventions, ed. with Jie-Hyun Lim (2021), and Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century, ed. with Theodor Michael (2017).
Response: HELMUT WALSER SMITH
The table of content and introduction of the book are available here
Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, UNC Center for European Studies
For the H-German Roundtable on Helmut Walser Smith, Germany: A Nation in Its Time Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000 (2020), which was the result of the above event, click here.
Friday, 8 October 2021
UNC Chapel Hill I 3:30 – 5:30 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome and Moderation: ANDREA SINN I O’Briant Developing Professor and Associate Professor of History I Elon University, Department of History & Geography
TERESA WALCH I Assistant Professor I UNC-Greensboro, Department of History
“Cleansing” Germany: Ideology, Space, and the Nazi Consolidation of Power
Holocaust history has experienced its own “spatial turn” in the past decade, and important studies have examined the role space played in ethnic cleansing and genocide in central Europe during the 1940s. This project shifts the analytic focus from wartime spatial planning to everyday spaces in 1930s Germany to illuminate how the Nazi regime first formulated and began implementing policies of spatial cleansing. National Socialists believed that all of Germany had been contaminated by “Judeo-Bolshevism” in the post-World War I era. In 1933, the Nazi regime and its allied architects, city planners, bureaucrats, and ordinary citizens set out to “cleanse” and remake everyday spaces according to this worldview. The talk explores how antisemitic notions of a Germany infected by Jews immediately and forcefully instigated efforts to render Germany physically, symbolically, and rhetorically “judenrein” during the Nazi consolidation of power.
TERESA WALCH is an Assistant Professor of Modern European History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research examines the politics of space and place in modern Germany. Her book manuscript, Degenerate Spaces: The Coordination of Space in Nazi Germany, investigates the relationship between Nazi ideology and spatial practices between 1933-1945. She is also co-editing a volume entitled Räume der deutschen Geschichte, set to appear with Wallstein Verlag in 2021.
Comment: CHRISTOPHER BROWNING I Porter Graham Distinguished Professor Emeritus I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
Co-Conveners: Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, Departments of History, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies Carolina; Appalachian State University, Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies
Friday, 22 October 2021
UNC Chapel Hill I 2:00 – 4:00 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome and Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN I James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
Book Discussion:
HEDWIG RICHTER I Professor of Modern and Contemporary History I University of the Bundeswehr, Munich, Department of History
Democracy – A German Affair? Rethinking the German Past
Can and should the history of democracy in Germany be written as a success story? With her newest book, Demokratie: Eine deutsche Affaire, Hedwig Richter, professor at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, has generated fierce debate by claiming that democracy has a longer history in Germany than the older, male-dominated scholarship has claimed with its contested notion of a German Sonderweg (special path) that deviated from the West. Written for a broader audience, the book provides a provocative new interpretation of democracy in German history and the role of the people by defending gradual reform from above, integrating gender and the body, and calling for a transnational approach. Critics contend that Richter makes Imperial Germany appear improbably democratic and the Third Reich less totalitarian. The aim of the discussion is to explore the limits and possibilities of a more balanced interpretation of the long 19th century for the scholarly and public rethinking of modern German history.
HEDWIG RICHTER Is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich. Her wide-ranging research interests include the history of democracy and dictatorship, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, and gender in history. Her most recent publications include: Demokratie. Eine deutsche Affäre (2020); Moderne Wahlen: Eine Geschichte der Demokratie in Preußen und den USA im 19. Jahrhundert (2017); and the edited volume Frauenwahlrecht: Die Demokratisierung der Demokratie in Deutschland und Europa (ed. with Kerstin Wolff, 2017).
Comments:
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- OLIVER F.R. HAARDT I Junior Research Fellow I University of Cambridge, Magdalene College
Is a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the history of the state in modern Europe, particularly Germany. His ongoing book project examines the constitutional transformation of the German Empire between 1871 and 1918. His 2016 dissertation on the federal evolution of Imperial Germany was awarded the Helmut-Coing-Prize by the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.
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- SYLVIA SCHRAUT I Professor Emerita of Modern History I University of the Bundeswehr, Munich, Department of History
- SYLVIA SCHRAUT I Professor Emerita of Modern History I University of the Bundeswehr, Munich, Department of History
Is Professor Emerita of Modern History at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich. Her research interests include social and urban history, the history of nobility, and women’s and gender history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her publications include: Bürgerinnen im Kaiserreich. Biografie eines Lebensstils (2013); Erinnern, Vergessen, Umdeuten? Europäische Frauenbewegung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (ed. with Angelika Schaser and Petra Steymans-Kurz, 2019).
Response: HEDWIG RICHTER
Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History and Center for European Studies
Friday, 12 November, 2021
UNC Chapel Hill I 2:00 – 4:00 pm I Zoom Webinar
Welcome and Moderation: THOMAS PEGELOW KAPLAN I Levine Distinguished Professor of Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies I Appalachian State University, Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies
NCGS Sub-Series “CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONS”:
Roundtable: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Global Perspective
The electoral success of rightwing populist parties in major democracies has sparked an international discussion about the efficacy of “fascism” as an analytical framework. Do analogies with early and mid-twentieth century fascist movements and governments make sense today? What attributes, if any, do they share today and with historical fascism? To date, the German and Italian “models” have dominated the discussion about “strongmen” and authoritarianism. This roundtable takes a global perspective by posing these questions in relation to India, Brazil, Poland, and Germany.
Roundtable Participants:
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- KORNELIA KONCZAL I Post-doctoral Researcher I Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Institute of Eastern and South Eastern Studies: East Central Europe
Is a post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of History and the Arts at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Her research interests include the social history of post-1945 Europe, the transnational history of the social sciences and humanities, as well as memory and heritage studies. She is currently preparing a book tited Politics of Plunder: Post-German Property and the Reconstruction of East Central Europe after the Second World War.
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- MELISSA TEIXEIRA I Assistant Professor I University of Pennsylvania, Department of History: Brazil
Is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches on Latin American and global history. Her first book, Remaking Capitalism in Twentieth-Century Brazil: A Global History, examines Brazil’s interwar experiment with corporatism to explain the rise of the developmentalist state, and why it matters that this transformation was engineered under an authoritarian regime.
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- SHRUTI KAPILA I Lecturer I University of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College: India
Researches and teaches modern Indian history and global political thought and is University Lecturer the Faculty of History and Fellow and Director of Studies at Corpus Christi College at the University of Cambridge. Her publications include the edited volume s An Intellectual History for India (2010); and Political Thought in Action: Bhagavad Gita and Modern India (2013). Her new book Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age will be published by Princeton University Press in 2021.
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- A. DIRK MOSES I Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History: German Central Europe
Is the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History. Before coming to Chapel Hill, Moses taught at the University of Sydney for twenty years and was Professor of Global and Colonial History at the European University Institute in Florence. His first monograph, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past was published in 2007 and his second monograph, entitled The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression, will arrive in 2021.
Co-Conveners: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History; Center for European Studies; Carolina Center for Jewish Studies Carolina; Appalachian State University, Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies
Friday, December 3, 2021
UNC Chapel Hill I 3:30 – 5:30 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome and Moderation: TERESA WALCH I Assistant Professor I UNC-Greensboro, Department of History
KEVIN J. HOEPER I Graduate Student I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
Rediscovering the Regiment: Tradition and Transformation in the Habsburg Army, 1867-1914
In the armies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, much of military life centered on the regiment. As cultural institutions and combat formations, army regiments not only provided soldiers with a sense of belonging, but also served as focal points for local, regional, and even national patriotisms. Despite the regiment’s centrality to military culture, though, scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have rarely analyzed the meaning of regimental tradition or the dynamics of regimental identity formation. This presentation offers just such an analysis, focusing on the Austro-Hungarian example. While sharing certain basic characteristics with other contemporary European states, Austria-Hungary’s regimental system also reflected the empire’s stunning level of ethnolinguistic diversity. As I argue, the regiment in Austria-Hungary served as an important intermediate military space where soldiers negotiated the complex web of local, regional, dynastic, and ethnic loyalties that characterized public life in late imperial Austria.
KEVIN J. HOEPER is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on war, violence, and military culture in the Habsburg empire and its successor states. His ongoing dissertation project, with the working title “Our Regiment: Military Tradition in the Bohemian Lands, 1867-1942,” explores the creation and cultivation of regimental identities in Austria-Hungary and in the interwar Czechoslovak Republic.
Comment: CHAD BRYANT I Associate Professor I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies
Spring 2022
For a PDF of the spring program overview click here
Friday, 21 January 2022
UNC Chapel Hill I 1:00-2:30 pm I Zoom Seminar
With the Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize Winner for Advanced Graduate Students in 2021
Young Scholar Writing Seminar: How to Write a Good Article for a History Journal?
I: Introduction:
MONICA BLACK I Professor of History I University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and editor of the journal Central European History
How to Write a Good History Journal Article?
MONICA BLACK is Associate Professor at the Department of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Her research focuses on Modern Germany and Europe with an emphasis on the era of the World Wars and the decades immediately after 1945. She is the Editor of the journal Central European History. Her books include: Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (2010); A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (2020).
II: Presentation by the Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize Winner for Advanced Graduate Students in 2021:
JOHNATHON SPEED I Graduate Student I Vanderbilt University
A “Child Export”: the Swabian Children at the Austro-German Border, 1897-1914
Inspired by a long-brewing moral panic, a regional coalition of state actors ordered the removal of dozens of so-called “Swabian Children” back across the Austro-German border in 1911. These extraditions embedded Austrian sovereignty in the very bodies of these migrants, while simultaneously abrogating parents’ rights as legal guardians. In drafting these reforms absent corresponding legislation from the imperial centers, these bureaucrats demonstrated their capacity as agents of meaningful legal change. This paper explores how, spurred to outrage about this purported “child export,” state actors at the local level wielded the vast powers of the provincial state to exert control over these children and their families. And by introducing the possibility of physical removal, they transformed the Swabian Children into a truly transnational migration regime. This was thus the moment at which the national categories of Austria and Germany finally mattered more than regional ones like Swabia, Tyrol, or Vorarlberg.
JOHNATHON SPEED is a PhD Candidate in History at Vanderbilt University, where he is writing a dissertation on the peculiar Alpine child migrants known as the “Swabian Children.” His research was supported by the Institute for European History (IEG) at Mainz and the Free University of Berlin. His research interests focus on the intersection of the history of childhood and youth, migration studies, and legal history in Central Europe since the nineteenth century.
Comments by:
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- MONICA BLACK
- CHAD BRYANT I Associate Professor I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
Organization and Moderation: KEVIN J. HOEPER and KENNETH ALARCÓN NEGY I Graduate Students I UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History
The paper will be distributed to the participants before the workshop. Please contact the organizers of the event.
Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, and Center for European Studies
Friday, 21 January 2022
UNC Chapel Hill I 3:30 – 5:30 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome and Moderation: KAREN HAGEMANN I James G. Kenan Distinguished Professor of History at UNC Chapel Hill, Department of History
Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize Winner for Advanced Graduate Students in 2021
JOHNATHON SPEED I Graduate Student I Vanderbilt University
The Swabian Children and Child Welfare in the Eastern Alps, 1820-1921
Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of children from the Austrian Alps undertook yearly journeys to Southwest Germany, where they negotiated labor contracts at “child markets” (Kindermärkte) for work as domestics and shepherds. From its first discovery in the 1820s up to its dissolution a century later, a loose coalition of regional bureaucrats and administrators took steps transforming these so-called “Swabian Children” into public wards of the provincial state. These interventions drastically changed what it meant to be a Schwabenkind. Under sustained state pressures, these children began to travel by different means, to conclude labor terms by written contracts, and to associate more with state servants than family members in their pursuit of work abroad. This talk reveals how, contrary to past scholarship, the “Swabian Children” were hardly impervious to state oversight. By 1900, it might rather be argued that they had been fashioned as a state-based category of public welfare.
JOHNATHON SPEED is a PhD Candidate in History at Vanderbilt University, where he is writing a dissertation on the peculiar Alpine child migrants known as the “Swabian Children.” His research was supported by the Institute for European History (IEG) at Mainz and the Free University of Berlin. His research interests focus on the intersection of the history of childhood and youth, migration studies, and legal history in Central Europe since the nineteenth century.
Introduction of the Prize Winner: JAMES CHAPPEL I Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History I Duke University, Department of History
Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of History, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, Center for European Studies
Thursday and Friday, March 3–4, 2022
UNC Chapel, Johnston Center for Undergraduate Excellence in Graham Memorial Hall
218 E. Franklin St. Chapel Hill, NC 27514 and partly Zoom Webminar
NCGS —North Carolina German Studies Seminar and Workshop Series
German Historians In North America After 1945: Transatlantic Careers and Scholarly Contributions
For the program click here
Friday, April 8, 2022
UNC Chapel Hill I 3:30 – 5:30 pm I Zoom Seminar
Welcome: JAKOB NORBERG I Associate Professor of German and Chair I Duke University, Department of German Studies
VANCE BYRD I Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania
The Allied Bombing Raids in Dresden and Panoramic Representation
Invented in 1787, the panorama was an attraction that gave audiences around the world the opportunity to immerse themselves in natural and city landscapes as well as bloody battle scenes depicted on larger-than-life circular paintings. After nearly one-hundred years of relative obscurity, panoramas have become popular again in the twenty-first century. Over ten million visitors have seen Yadegar Asisi’s panoramas in Germany and France since 2003. This talk focusses on Asisi’s panoramic representation of Dresden after the allied bombing raids of February 1945, which establishes a debatable comparison to military violence and destruction in Rotterdam, Coventry, Stalingrad, and Warsaw during World War II. The presentation will challenge a universalizing narrative about European trauma and military conflict and ask how exhibition design and site specificity contribute to debates on German victimhood, guilt, and responsibility
VANCE BYRD is Presidential Associate Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania and a scholar of nineteenth-century German literature. In addition to his first book, A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture, Byrd has co-edited two books and two journal special issues. He is working on a second monograph, Listening to Panoramas: Sonic and Visual Cultures of Commemoration, and a co-edited collection titled Queer Print Cultures.
Comment: PAUL JASKOT I Professor I Duke University, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies
Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of German Studies, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures
PDF of the Flyer