Gerda Henkel Lecture Tours starts with with Uwe Lübken and Martina Kessel
September 25, 2018
GHI West, the Pacific Regional Office of the Germany Historical Institute, Washington DC, launched a new program today in cooperation with the Gerda Henkel Foundation. The Gerda Henkel Lecture Tours brings German historians to the West Coast where they present their research at up to four different universities with the goal to facilitate the general dialogue between German historians and their colleagues in the U.S. and Canadian west.
The first tour started today with a lecture by Uwe Lübken (LMU Munich) on How Natural are Natural Disasters? at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Uwe Lübken will continue his tour with stops at the University of Oregon, Eugene (September 28), the University of California, Berkeley (October 2) and the University of Colorado, Boulder (October 4). Professor Lübken will also lecture on Environmental Change and Migration in Historical Perspective.
The second fall tour will bring Martina Kessel (Bielefeld University) to the University of California, Los Angeles (October 2), the University of Southern California (October 3), the University of California, Berkeley (October 9), and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (October 11). Professor Kessel with talk about Performing Germanness: Laughter and Violence in Nazi Germany.
The Gerda Henkel Lecture Tours will continue next year with Sven Reichard (Konstanz University) and Nina Verheyen (Cologne University).
Speaker Biographies:
Uwe Lübken is professor of American history at Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. He has held teaching and research positions at the universities of Cologne, Munich, Münster and at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. His publications include a prize-winning book on the U.S. perception of the National Socialist threat to Latin America and several edited volumes, special issues, and articles on (American) transnational history and the history of natural hazards and catastrophes. He has published a history of flooding of the Ohio River (2014) and co-edited volumes on urban fires (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012), the management of natural resources (Berghahn Books, 2014) and city-river relations (Pittsburgh University Press, 2016). His current work explores the intersections of mobilities and the environment.
Martina Kessel is a Historian of Modern Germany at Bielefeld University, Germany, with particular interest in inclusion and exclusion, the history of violence, international relations, gender and cultural history. She has written on British and French policy towards Germany after 1945; a History of Boredom in the 19th century, and on questions of theory and historiography. Her forthcoming book is titled Gewalt und Gelächter