John-Paul Stonard completed his PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and is a London-based writer and art historian, and a member of the consultative committee of The Burlington Magazine. His books include Fault Lines. Art in Germany 1945-55 (2007); as editor and contributor, The Books that Shaped Art History (2013); and Germany Divided. Baselitz and his Generation (2014). He was the co-curator of Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation (Tate Britain, 2014).
He has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary art and is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and The Burlington Magazine.
Eveline Kilian was appointed Professor of English Cultural Studies and Cultural History at HU in 2006 and has held various guest professorships at the Universities of Frankfurt am Main, Tübingen, Freiburg, Saarbrücken and Göttingen. Since April 2011 she has been the director of the Institute for English and American studies. Further research interests include gender studies, metropolitan cultures (especially London) and modernism and post-modernism. A current research project focuses on English writers in Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s.
Sabine Kalff has been a researcher at the Humboldt University, Berlin since 2013 working under the direction of Professor Ulrike Vedder. Previously her research has concentrated on modern German literature and on theories of gender in literature. She has also worked on European drama at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Her Habilitationsprojekt is entitled: Aerial Affairs. Weibliche Verhaltenslehren im Luftkrieg, Deutschland und Großbritannien. 1925-1947.
Gesa Stedman is Professor of British culture and literature at the Centre for British Studies at the Humboldt University. After studying English, French and Theatre/Film Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Warwick, she worked as a junior lecturer at the HU Centre for British Studies, which she helped set up in the late 1990s. She has written widely on the subject of cultural exchange and has co-edited the Journal for the Study of British Cultures from 2007-2013, and the Anglo-German magazine Hard Times from 2005-2013. She heads the research network “Writing 1900” together with Dr Stefano Evangelista (Oxford) and is currently working on a book on Anglophone travellers to Berlin with Dr Evangelista.
Ulrike Vedder has been Professor of German Literature at the Institute for German Literature at the Humboldt University, Berlin since 2009. Her work focuses on German literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, genealogy and gender, concepts of afterlife and generation, and the transformation of the family and gender in the present.
Frank Trommler has been a member of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania since 1970, first as an Associate Professor, since 1974 as a Professor. He has taught courses in German language, literature and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and, since 1985, also in Comparative Literature. A Guggenheim Fellow in 1984/85, Trommler was President of the AATG chapter Philadelphia in 1986-1990, President of the German Studies Association in 1991/92, and Director of the Humanities Program at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies in Washington, DC, from 1995-2003. In 2004 he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz by the President of the Federal Republic for his work in the field of American-German relations. Trommler published the first comprehensive study of German cultural diplomacy with France, Britain, United States, Russia, Poland, and Italy in 2014 under the title, Kulturmacht ohne Kompass: Deutsche auswärtige Kulturbeziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert.
Professor Scherpe is a Berlin-based expert in modern German literature. Before taking up a professorship at the Humboldt University in 1993, he taught at the Freie Universität, Berlin. He has held numerous guest professorships across the globe, most recently in the USA, Australia, and Argentina. He has published extensively on post-war German literature.
Manuel Köppen studied German literature and the history of art at the universities of Bochum and Berlin (FU). He is currently a teacher and researcher at the Institute for German Literature at the Humboldt University, Berlin. He has written extensively on twentieth century literary and visual culture including Kunst und Literatur nach Auschwitz (1993) and Kunst der Propaganda. Film im Dritten Reich (2008).
William I. Hitchcock is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Randolph P. Compton Professor at UVa’s Miller Center. His work and teaching focus on the international, diplomatic and military history of the 20th century, in particular the era of the world wars and the cold war. He has written widely on trans-Atlantic relations and European history and politics.
He received his PhD from Yale in 1994, working under the supervision of Paul Kennedy. He is the author of France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe (UNC, 1998); From War to Peace: Altered Strategic Landscapes in the 20th Century (Yale, 2000); The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945-present (Doubleday/Anchor, 2002); and The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Free Press, 2008) which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a winner of the George Louis Beer Prize, and a Financial Times bestseller in the UK. His most recent book is The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (co-edited with Petra Goedde and Akira Iriye, Oxford: 2012).
Werner Sollors received his PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin and is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is also Visiting Global Professor of Literature at New York University Abu Dhabi and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences as well as Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and of the Bayerische Amerika-Akademie. His past publications include the books Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Literature and Culture (1986), Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature(1997), and Ethnic Modernism (2008), as well as such essays as “W. E. B. Du Bois in Nazi Germany, 1936” (in Amerikastudien, 1999) and “Goodbye Germany” (in Transit,2004). He co-edited with Winfried Fluck, German? American? Literature? (2002), with Greil Marcus A New Literary History of America (2009), and with Julia Faisst and Alan Rosen Die Toten habe ich nicht befragt (2011), David Boder’s 1946 collection of interviews with survivors.
In April 2014 he published The Temptation of Despair: Tales of the 1940swhich draws on post-war diaries, photographs, newspaper articles, government reports, essays, works of fiction, and film and examines the experiences of defeat and liberation, homelessness and repatriation, concentration camps and denazification.
Erhardt Schütz has been Professor of Modern German Literature at the Humboldt University since 1996 and is an expert in post-war German literature and cinema having written on cultural politics during the Allied occupation of Germany and on early rubble cinema. He is a cultural critic for newspapers including Tagesspiegel, Der Freitag and Das Magazin. He edits the Zeitschrift für Germanistik and is a member of the German PEN Centre.
Martin Schieder is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Leipzig. His research focuses on French and German art, on cultural transfer between France and Germany, on exhibition and studio studies and political iconography. His study Regarding the Other: The Artistic Relationship between Germany and France 1945-1959 (2005) was awarded the French-German Parliament Prize in 2005.
David Pike is Professor of German at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is an expert on German writers in Soviet exile between 1933 and 1945. He has also authored The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany 1945-1949 (1993) and continues to work in the area of the post-war Soviet occupation of Germany.
Helmut Peitsch has been Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Potsdam since 2001. He has previously held positions at the Universities of Cardiff, Swansea, Leeds and New York. His research interests include post-war German writing which is a subject on which he has written extensively. His publications include: Berlin seit dem Kriegsende (1989), “Deutschlands Gedächtnis an seine dunkelste Zeit”. Zur Funktion der Autobiographik in den Westzonen Deutschlands und den Westsektoren von Berlin 1945-1949 (1990), “No Politics”? Die Geschichte des deutschen PEN-Zentrums in London 1933-2002 (2006), Nachkriegsliteratur 1945-1989 (with Helen Thein, 2009) and Walter Boehlich: Die Antwort ist das Unglück der Frage. Ausgewählte Schriften (2011).
Norman Naimark is Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of Eastern European Studies, at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division. He taught at Boston University, and was a fellow at Harvard University‘s Russian Research Center before returning to Stanford as a member of the faculty in the late 1980s. His current research focuses on the history of genocide in the 20th century and on post-war Soviet policy in Europe.
Wolfgang Mühl-Benninghaus has been Professor of Film Theory and History at the Humboldt University, Berlin since 1993. He is the Deputy Director of the Institute of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University. He was the Director of the Institute of Theatre Studies and Cultural Communication at the Humboldt University from 1994 to 2003. He has held guest professorships at the universities of Vienna, Istanbul and Moscow. He has written extensively on film, particularly on German film in the first half of the twentieth century.
Giles MacDonogh is a writer, historian and journalist and has written extensively on the subject of German history. He was educated at the City of London School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read modern history. He later carried out historical research at the École pratique des hautes études, Paris. His Social History of the Third Reich is due out in 2015.
Daniel Leab received his PhD from Columbia University where for over a decade he was employed as a senior administrator and faculty member. He is currently Professor of History at Seton Hall University. His research interests include labour history (for over two decades he edited Labor History), history in film (one of his articles won the annual prize for the best article in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television), and the cultural conflicts of the Cold War (he is a founder of American Communist History which he has edited for over a decade). He has twice been a Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Cologne as well as a Visiting Professor there and elsewhere. His publications include Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm, I was a Communist for the FBI: The Life and Unhappy Times of Mark Cvetic, and “Hollywood und die deutsche Filmkultur” in Die USA und Deutschland im Zeitalter des Kalten Krieges 1945-1990: Ein Handbuch (ed. Detlef Junker).
Jennifer Fay is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and English at Vanderbilt University. Her teaching and research interests are broadly concerned with the intersection of political culture and cinema. Her monograph Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany offers a political theory of film in U.S. Occupied Germany. The book considers German and American film culture through the theatrical touchstone of occupation mimicry and the performative force of American liberalism. In addition, she co-edited a special issue of CR: The New Centennial Review on “The Cultures of Occupation”, which advances a research agenda of comparative occupation studies. Her co-written book on global film noir argues for a connection between this genre and the experience of foreign military occupation in Germany, France, and Japan.
Gabriele Clemens has been Professor for modern Western European History at the University of Hamburg since 1998 and she is owner of the Jean Monnet Chair for European Integration History and European Studies. Her recent major research projects explore the history of European integration, especially the development of an European identity, the European Film policy in the 1950s and 1960s and the development of a European Foreign Policy in the 1970s. Among others she has written on the subject of cultural policy in occupied Germanyfrom 1945-1949 and specifically in the British zone of occupation: Britische Kulturpolitik in Deutschland 1945-1949: Literatur, Film, Musik und Theater.
Stephen Brockmann is Professor of German with courtesy appointments in English and History at Carnegie Mellon University. He was the president of the German Studies Association in 2012-2013, and he currently serves as president of the International Brecht Society. In 2007 he won the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies/Humanities. His major research projects explore the relationship between literature and culture on the one hand and German national identity on the other. His most recent book, A Critical History of German Film, which was published in 2010, is an overview of German film history from the perspective of German national identity. German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour, published in 2004, examines the ways in which German intellectuals and writers, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, confronted perhaps the most difficult complex of problems ever faced by modern intellectuals in the western world: the complete defeat and devastation of their country, the crimes of the Hitler dictatorship, the onset of the Cold war, and ultimately the political division of the nation. He is currently at work on a book about East German literary culture from 1945-1958.
Rebecca Boehling is Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is presently on leave to direct the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, a centre for documentation, information and research on the fate of victims of National Socialist persecution and the Holocaust and the experience of Displaced Persons in the aftermath of the defeat of the Nazi regime. She served on a historians’ advisory panel to the U.S. government that helped oversee the declassification of U.S. government documents related to Nazi and Imperial Japanese war crimes committed during the Second World War. In 2000 professor Boehling received a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, part of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., where she began work on a comparative examination of denazification in post-Second World War Germany under western Allied occupation. Her other recent work deals with the history of the Holocaust and its post-war aftermath.
Richard Bessel is Professor of Twentieth Century History at the University of York. He works on the social and political history of modern Germany, the aftermath of the two world wars and the history of violence. He is a member of the Editorial Board of History Today. During 2012 he was a Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. His most recent book is about Germany in 1945, and more generally on the emergence of the German people from the violence and trauma of Nazism and war. As such, this forms part of a broader research interest on the social, cultural and psychological legacies of the violence of the Second World War across Europe.
