Research

I am a cultural, social, and political historian of twentieth-century Europe, with a special interest in the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. My other key research interests are migration and displacement; architecture, urban planning, and city life; nationalism and internationalism; and film studies. My geographical area of specialization is Germany. However, my work ranges broadly across continental Europe and has a strong comparative and transnational dimension.

My first book, entitled Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, tackles the big question of how Europeans made sense of the Second World War. It examines how Eastern European refugees in postwar Germany defined and represented themselves. Focusing on Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish refugees, it explores how divergent historical narratives about the war, especially wartime encounters with Nazi and Soviet power, formed the basis for the development of distinct displaced political communities.

I am currently working on two new book-length research projects. The first, entitled “Somewhere in Europe: Children and the Legacy of National Socialism in Postwar Film,” explores how postwar European filmmakers addressed what was perceived as one of the critical issues of the day: “war children.” Combining historical and film studies methodologies, it examines how the “problem” of war children was represented in popular culture and how popular cultural understandings drew on and fed discussions among politicians, social workers, and medical professionals.

My second project, entitled “Jewish Space in Postwar Germany,” grows out of my long-standing interests in architecture, urban planning, and city life. It employs spatial history as a new window onto both the reconstruction of Jewish life in postwar Germany and postwar German attitudes towards Jews. It examines how Jewish survivors carved out autonomous spaces in Germany and how they shared space with Germans. I situate these spatial practices in the shifting legal and political order of early postwar Germany.

I am also involved in a large collaborative research project entitled “Geographies of the Holocaust.” Based at Middlebury College and Texas State University, the project brings together historians, art historians, and geographers to explore how spatial methods of analysis can enhance our knowledge of the Holocaust. Together with the geographer Alberto Giordano, I am examining spatio-temporal patterns of flight and deportation in Italy during the period of German occupation. There is a website for this project at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:  

http://www.ushmm.org/learn/mapping-initiatives/geographies-of-the-holocaust

A visualization for the Italian case study can also be found at the Stanford Spatial History Project website:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory/cgi-bin/site/viz.php?id=383&project_id=1015

Finally, I recently completed a collaborative research project entitled "The Refugee in the Postwar World, 1945-60," which examined the refugee crises of the early postwar period from a global perspective. The key objective was to gain a better understanding of this pivotal period of global population upheavals, which was also a critical moment in the formation of the international refugee regime. The first part of this project was a conference held at ASU in April 2010. The second part was a special issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies which appeared in September 2012. More information about the conference can be found here:

http://jewishstudies.clas.asu.edu/refugee

Selected Publications

Books

Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, in the series Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011)

Articles and Book Chapters

"Retracing the 'Hunt for Jews': A Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Arrests during the Holocaust in Italy," with Alberto Giordano, in Geographies of the Holocaust, ed. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming), 33 ms pages

“Introduction: The Refugee in the Postwar World, 1945-60,” with G. Daniel Cohen, Journal of Refugee Studies 25:3 (September 2012), 313-25

"The Ambivalent Exception: American Occupation Policy in Postwar Germany and the Formation of Jewish Refugee Spaces," Journal of Refugee Studies 25:3 (September 2012), 452-73

“Anticommunism in the Streets: Refugee Politics in Cold War Germany,”  Journal of Contemporary History 45:1 (January 2010), 134-161

“Between Nationalism and Internationalism: Displaced Persons at the UNRRA University of Munich," in Diaspora Identities: Exile, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Past and Present, ed. Susanne Lachenicht and Kerstin Heinsohn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press/Campus Verlag, 2009), 109-29

“Displacement and the Postwar Reconstruction of Education: Displaced Persons at the UNRRA University of Munich, 1945-1948,” Contemporary European History 17:2 (May 2008), 167-95

“From Political Prisoners to Displaced Persons: Nationalism, Anti-Communism, and Ambivalence in the Formation of a Polish DP Community,” in Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: Current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution, edited by Johannes-Dieter Steinert and Inge Weber-Newth (Osnabrück: Secolo, 2008)

“Framing the Problem of Displaced Children: Wartime Trauma and Postwar Recovery in The Search” (in preparation), 30 mss pages

Teaching

My teaching focuses on modern German and European history and the history of migration. I regularly teach courses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, the Holocaust, European fascism, Europe since 1945, migration in modern Europe, and history and film.