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:

• • 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.”

• • 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).

• • 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). 

• • 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

PDF of the Flyer

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

PDF of the Flyer

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:

• • 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.

• • 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

PDF of the Flyer

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:

• • 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. 

• • 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. 

• • 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. 

• • 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

PDF of the Flyer

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  

PDF of the Flyer

Spring 2022

Thursday, 20 January 2022

UNC Chapel Hill  I  5:00-7:00 pm  I  UNC Fedex Glocal Education Center, room 4003 I On campus and Zoom Webinar

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  Associate 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:

• • 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

PDF of the Flyer

Friday, 21 January 2022

UNC Chapel Hill  I  3:30 – 5:30 pm   I  UNC Fedex Glocal Education Center, room 4003 I On campus and 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

Konrad H. Jarausch Essay Prize Winner for Advanced Graduate Students in 2021

JOHNATHON SPEED I Graduate Student  I  Vanderbilt University

The Case of Kreis Debica: 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.

Welcome: LISA LINDSAY I  Professor of History and Chair  I   UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

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

PDF of the Flyer

February 2022 (Date needs to be confirmed)

UNC Chapel Hill  I  3:30 – 5:30 pm

Welcome: JOSHUA SHELLY  I  Carolina-Duke Graduate Program in German

Moderation and Introduction:  PRISCILLA LAYNE   I  Associate Professor of German  I  UNC Chapel Hill, Department of German and Slavic Languages and Literature

Joint event with the German Studies Graduate Student Seminar and Workshop Series “(DIS) UNITY”:

DENIZ GÖKTÜRK  I  Professor of German  I   University of California, Berkeley, Department of German

Framing Migration: Seven Takes on Movement and Borders

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of German Studies, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures

GRADUATE WORSHOP
Teaching against Racism and for Diversity with Professor DENIZ GÖKTÜRK

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 I  On Campus and partly Zoom Webinar

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

Registration for the workshop is necessary; on a first-come, first-served basis.

Please send an email with your name, position and institutional affiliation
to the workshop  assistant KEVIN J. HOEPER: kjhoeper@live.unc.edu

Friday, March 25, 2022

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

KENNETH ALARCÓN NEGY  I  Graduate Student  I  UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History

The Transmission of Fascism: National Socialism in the Spanish Context, 1931-1945

In the early 1930s, Spain’s newly established Second Republic quickly proved that it was no exception to the general fragility of democracy in interwar Europe.  The growing state of disarray encouraged many Spaniards to search for alternative political models to remedy their nation’s political and social ills. For the Spanish right, the unexpected rise of Nazi Germany in 1933 highlighted a possible solution in fascism, which now seemed capable of spreading outside of its Italian birthplace. From that point up to the downfall of the Third Reich, a small minority of intermediaries in Spain and Germany would therefore work actively to promote National Socialism in a Spanish context. This presentation focuses on the ways in which the German variant of fascism was transformed to make it more suitable for a Spanish audience, as well as on the intermediaries who sought to strengthen the fascist ties between the two disparate nations. 

KENNETH ALARCÓN NEGY is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  His research examines the fascist relationship between Spain and Germany, with special emphasis on their cultural connections.

Comment: TOBIAS HOF  I  Privatdozent I  Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich,  Department of History

Co-Conveners: Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, and Center for European Studies

PDF of the Flyer

Friday, April 8, 2022

UNC Chapel Hill  I  3:30 – 5:30 pm   I  UNC Fedex Global Education Center, room 4003  I  On campus and Zoom Seminar

Welcome: ANDREA SINN   I  O’Briant Developing Professor and Associate Professor of History  I  Elon University, Department of History & Geography

VANCE BYRD  I  Associate Professor  I   Grinnell College, Department of German Studies

Remembering the Franco-Prussian War in Nineteenth-Century Print and Visual Culture

Moderation: JAKOB NORBERG I  Associate Professor of German and Chair  I  Duke University, Department of German Studies

Co-Conveners: Duke University, Department of German Studies, and UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages & Literatures

PDF of the Flyer