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The Fall 2017 newsletter of the University of California, Berkeley, Institute of European Studies (IES). I was a Visiting Scholar at IES from August 2017 to Feb 2018, and from March 1st 2018, I will become an IES Senior Fellow. My bio is on page 8, and summaries of my lectures are on page 30 (Migration) and 31 (WWI and WWII Reparations and European Integration).

Als 1917 die Revolution Frauen den Männern gleichstellt, ist die Sowjetunion das fortschrittlichste Land der Welt: Frauen dürfen wählen, studieren und in die Politik gehen.

Gegenstand des Projekts ist die Konstruktion des Zeitzeugendiskurses mehrerer führender Mitglieder der deutschen Militärverwaltung in Brüssel. Arbeitshypothese ist, dass die Konstruktion in drei Phasen verlief: Der „Generalprozess“ (1950-1951) gegen Alexander von Falkenhausen und Eggert Reeder (gefolgt von einer Reihe anderer Prozesse bis in die 1980er Jahre hinein). Die Legitimierungs- und Verteidigungsdiskurse einiger Akteure gegenüber Anschuldigungen, die ihre Tätigkeiten während des Krieges betrafen.

En novembre 1910, le Journal des Tribunaux, principal organe d’information des juristes belges, qualifie la partie wallonne du Kreis allemand de Malmedy de « notre Alsace-Lorraine » où se trouveraient des « frères de race et de langue, exilés et emprisonnés en Prusse. » Le 20 septembre 1920, ce Kreis ainsi que celui d’Eupen, presque exclusivement germanophone, sont rattachés à la Belgique, suite au traité de Versailles et à un simulacre de consultation populaire.

Transhumanism, which appeared the second half of the twentieth century, is an ideological catalyser of a monopolistic concentration in progress in the context of the advent, on a worldwide scale, of hypermodernity. It reactualises the old fantasy of infinite youth and the belief in the immortality of the soul by using technoscience to argue in favour of its feasibility. What works in favour of transhumanism is that we would all like to believe in it because it flatters a latent wish to overcome our limits.

In media historiography, there have generally been two approaches to historicize past media technologies and their practices. Whereas media historians generally focus on historical changes by maintaining a diachronic perspective on how media technologies and practices develop over time, media archaeologists commonly adopt a synchronic perspective in (re)constructing parallel or alternative histories.

On July 10-14, 2018, the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) held its Second World Conference in Vienna and Budapest. The meeting was attended by around 450 participants from 54 countries, including renowned experts and practitioners, spanning all fields of the humanities and the social sciences. The ABS is the world’s largest academic organization dedicated to the systematic study and exchange of ideas, information and analysis of international border, and the processes and communities engendered by such borders.

Settlement patterns have been one of the central products of Stone Age archaeological research. Because of long time spans and very scarce information, scientific explanations of the patterns are usually limited to just defining the areas of the phenomena of interest. Any further deductions about past communities tend to be without additional proof and thus presented as hypotheses in scientific literature.