NCGS Seminar Spring 2023
Program Spring 2023
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, 27 January 2023 (Cancelled, moved to September 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, 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:
JAMES CHAPPEL I Gilhuly Family Associate Professor of History, Duke University, Department of History
DONNA HARSCH I Professor of History, Carnegie Mellon University, Department of History
Co-Conveners: UNC-Chapel Hill, Department of History, Center for European Studies, Duke Department of History
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, University North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of History
NCGS Series “CHALLENGING CONVERSATIONS” Roundtable:
#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 (Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz) in Higher Education and Research in the summer 2021. This campaign responded to a video titled “Ich bin Hanna” by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, which attempts to explain why fixed term contracts are necessary. With the argument that competition is needed in academia the video justifies a university system that does not know a tenure track, works untenured scholars to the point of burn-out, exploits them for unpaid teaching and only grants full professors 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 how the current structures and culture of the German academic system evolved and contribute to a discrimination of women, young scholars and academics with a diverse background and which reforms are necessary.
Roundtable Participants:
- 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. He is also a Post-Doc representative in the Board of the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands, the Association of German Historians.
- MURIEL GONZÁLEZ ATHENAS I Postdoc (Universitätsassistentin) at the Department of History and European Ethnology and the Center for Interdisziplinary Gender Studies at the University of Innsbruck
MURIEL GONZÁLEZ ATHENAS is a Postdoc (Universitätsassistentin) at the Department of History and European Ethnology and the Center for Interdisziplinary Gender Studies at the University of Innsbruck, after several years at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the 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).
- SYLVIA PALETSCHEK I Professor at the Department of History and Vice Rector for University Culture at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg
SYLVIA PALETSCHEK is Professor at the Department of History and Vice Rector for University Culture at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg. 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).
- MARY LINDEMANN I Professor Emerita at the Department of History at the University of Miami and former AHA President
MARY LINDEMANN is Professor Emerita at 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.”
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, 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, 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
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, 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 fields 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, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Department of History
Co-Conveners: Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill, Departments of History