Recent activity

Wrocław reopens

It has been an unusual year to do research abroad, as I have spent most of my time in Poland inside my own apartment, “Zoomed out” in front of a computer screen. Travel long remained restricted, restaurants and bars were closed, and public spaces felt risky due to the coronavirus pandemic. Spring 2021 felt like…
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Not Here, Not Anywhere: Local and Transnational Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany

Presentation for Institut de Recherches Historiques du Septentrion/Université de Lille “Politicisations: Emotions, Sociabilities, Frontiers” seminar

Wrocławska zima / Wrocław Winter

Photos from the Winter in Wrocław, where I have been conducting a research project about the German-Polish border.

Review: Augustine, Taking on Technocracy

Monograph reviewed for German Studies Review 44 (1), 2021 (pp. 208-210). Summary: Taking on Technocracy covers a broad range of developments in the domains of technology, policy, and protest, analyzing them with nuance in the different contexts of East and West Germany. For those wanting to understand why the issue of nuclear power has remained…
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Review: Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain

Monograph reviewed for German History in Volume 39, Issue 2, June 2021, Pages 330–332. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghab008 Summary: West Germany and the Iron Curtain is an ambitious re-examination of German history from its literal margins. Eckert’s methodologically innovative analysis not only straddles the East-West divide but interrogates 1945 and 1989/90 as chronological caesuras. Refracted through the environmental…
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Generating Post-Modernity: Nuclear Energy Opponents and the Future in the 1970s

Article published in European Review of History / Revue européenne d’histoire 28 (4), 2021, pp. 507-530. Abstract: During the 1970s, industrialised society seemed to be on the cusp of sweeping change, moving away from the Fordist ‘modern’ era and into an undefined ‘post-modern’ future. To contemporaries in France and West Germany, arguably nothing symbolized this…
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Pracujący nad granicą: Kontrola Polek i Polaków zatrudnionych w NRD, 1980-1989

Prezentacja w seminarium naukowym Ośrodku Badań Regionalnych i Obszarów Pogranicza (OBROP) w Uniwersytecie Wrocławskim Pomimo, że NRD zdecydowało o zamknięciu granicy z PRL w 1980 r., a w kolejnym roku został w Polsce ogłoszony stan wojenny, tysiące Polek i Polaków nadal codziennie przekraczało granicę w latach osiemdziesiątych, żeby pracować we wschodnioniemieckich fabrykach. Dla nich praca…
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Jesień we Wrocławiu / Fall in Wrocław

Starting in September 2020, I moved for a year to Wrocław, Poland, to conduct research as part of my DAAD project, entitled “Working the Border: Policing Labor along the Polish-East German Border, 1980-1989.” Here are some of my first impressions of the city in Fall 2020.

Towards a ‘Europe of Struggles’? Three Visions of Europe in the Early Anti-Nuclear Energy Movement, 1975–79

Chapter published in Christian Wenkel, Eric Bussière, Anahita Grisoni and Hélène Miard-Delacroix, eds., The Environment and the European Public Sphere: Perceptions, Actors, Policies (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2020), 124–146. See a review of this book here. Abstract: During the 1970s, opposition to nuclear energy was structured primarily by local siting decisions related to national nuclear…
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Review: Milder, Greening Democracy

Monograph reviewed for H-German (August 2020). Summary: Throughout Greening Democracy, Milder stresses that antinuclear activism was about more than the Greens and that it did more than just bring ’68ers into the fold of liberal, parliamentary democracy. These are welcome arguments, and Milder misses no opportunity to show how people of different generations and with…
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