Germany – Russia – USA
Speakers
Karl Schlögel
Karl Schlögel taught Eastern European History, first at the University of Konstanz and, from 1995, at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) until retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2013. He held research fellowships in Oxford, Uppsala, Budapest, Munich, Vienna and Los Angeles. His main areas of research and teaching include Russian modernity, Stalinism, diaspora and the history of expulsion, East Central European Urban Studies, and theoretical questions concerning historical narrative. He received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in 2018 and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2025, among other awards. His publications include: “American Matrix. Besichtigung einer Epoche” (2023), “Das sowjetische Jahrhundert. Archäologie einer untergegangenen Zivilisation“ (2017), “In Space We Read Time. On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics” (2016) and “Moscow, 1937” (2014).
Gwendolyn Sasse
Gwendolyn Sasse is the Director of the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) and Einstein Professor for Comparative Research on Democracy and Authoritarianism at Humboldt University of Berlin. Previously she was Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Oxford. Her social science research focuses on transition processes in Eastern Europe, migration and war. She is a frequent commentator in German and international media and regularly participates in public events. Among her most recent publications are “Russland – eine deutsche Erfindung” (2026) and “Russia’s War Against Ukraine” (English 2023).
György Dalos
György Dalos is a writer, translator and historian. In 1968, he was convicted in the so-called “Maoist Trial,” expelled from the Communist Party, and banned from pursuing his profession. During the 1970s, he worked as a translator from German and Russian. In 1977, he participated in the Hungarian democratic opposition. From 1992 to 1996, he served on the board of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Cologne and Berlin. From 1995 to 1999, he was director of the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Berlin. In 1997, he became a member of the Saxon Academy of Arts. His more recent publications include “Neutralität und Kaiserschmarrn: Eine Geschichte Österreichs seit 1945” (2025), “Das System Orbán: Die autoritäre Verwandlung Ungarns” (2022), “Für, gegen und ohne Kommunismus. Erinnerungen” (2019), “Der letzte Zar: Der Untergang des Hauses Romanow” (2017), and “Geschichte der Russlanddeutschen: Von Katharina der Großen bis zur Gegenwart” (2014).
Anne Hartmann
Anne Hartmann is a scholar of Slavic and German studies. After completing her doctorate and teaching in Liège and Namur, she worked as a research associate at Ruhr University Bochum, most recently on the research project “To Moscow: German Émigrés in Soviet Exile and in the Cultural Institutions of the GDR.” Her research interests include the Soviet “Leitkultur” (dominant culture) in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR, discourses on the Gulag, Western intellectuals, and Stalinism. Her publications include “Verstrickte Subjekte. Deutsche Emigranten im sowjetischen Exil” (2026), “Tribunale als Trauma. Die Deutsche Sektion des Sowjetischen Schriftstellerverbands. Protokolle, Resolutionen, Briefe (1935–1941)” (2022), “‘Auf nach Moskau!’ Reiseberichte aus dem Exil” (2018), “‘Ich kam, ich sah, ich werde schreiben.’ Lion Feuchtwanger in Moskau 1937. Eine Dokumentation” (2017), and “Born to be Criminal. The Discourse on Criminality and the Practice of Punishment in Late Imperial Russia and Early Soviet Union. Interdisciplinary Approaches” (2017).
Julia Voss
Julia Voss is a research associate at the President’s Office of the Deutsches Historisches Museum and honorary professor at Leuphana University in Lüneburg. From 2007 to 2017, she was in charge of the arts desk at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and in 2014, she was appointed deputy head of the features section. In 2013, she curated the exhibition “1938: Kunst, Künstler, Politik” at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt; in 2021, she co-curated the exhibition “documenta: Politics and Art” (with Lars Bang Larsen and Dorothee Wierling), and in 2025 “Nature and German History. Faith – Biology – Power” (both at the DHM). She is currently working with Christopher Clark on the exhibition “Portraits of German History (working title), which will open in April 2028. Her publications include (with Daniel Birnbaum):“Hilma af Klint und Wassily Kandinsky träumen von der Zukunft” (2024) and “Hilma af Klint. A Biography” (2022).
Katherine Zubovich
Katherine Zubovich is Associate Professor of History at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Her research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C., where she was the James H. Billington Fellow in 2021-22. She is the author of “Making Cities Socialist” (2024) and “Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital” (2020).
Hope M. Harrison
Hope M. Harrison is Professor of History & International Affairs at The George Washington University. She has received fellowships from Fulbright, the Nobel Institute in Oslo, the American Academy in Berlin, Harvard, the Wilson Center, and the Alfried Krupp Institute for Advanced Study in Greifswald, Germany, and has published in scholarly journals and in newspapers, such as the Washington Post. She has appeared on CNN, C-SPAN, the BCC, the History Channel, Deutschlandradio and German television. Harrison is the author of three books on the Berlin Wall: “The Berlin Wall: A World Divided” (2021), “After the Berlin Wall: Memory and the Making of the New Germany, 1989 to the Present” (2019), and the prize-winning “Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961” (2003). Her current book project examines life and death at East Germany’s Baltic Sea border during the Cold War.
Hans-Peter Müller
Hans-Peter Müller is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Humboldt University Berlin (1992 -2019) and was editor in chief of the “Berliner Journal für Soziologie” (1992-2018). He was a JFK-Fellow at Harvard University in 1986/87, Max Weber Professor at NYU from 1997-1999, and Visiting Professor at the UC Berkeley in 2013. His research interests include classical and contemporary social theory, social inequality, cultural sociology, and the conduct of life. Recent publications: “Krise und Kritik. Klassiker der soziologischen Zeitdiagnose” (2021), “Max Weber. Eine Spurensuche” (2020), and “Simmel-Handbuch” (co-editor, 2018). “Georg Simmel oder die Abenteuer des Geistes. Eine Biographie” will be published shortly.
Lawrence A. Scaff
Lawrence A. Scaff is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Sociology at Wayne State University, Detroit. Previously, he has taught at the University of Arizona, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Freiburg as a Fulbright scholar affiliated with Wilhelm Hennis. He is the coeditor of “The Oxford Handbook of Max Weber” (2020) and the author of “Weber and the Weberians” (2014), “Max Weber in America” (2011), and “Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber” (1989).
Kate A. Baldwin
Kate A. Baldwin is Professor of English, Communication, and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Tulane University, where she specializes in 20th- and 21st-century U.S. and Russian literatures and Cold War culture. She was Professor of American Studies and Communication at Northwestern University and held fellowships at Brown University’s Pembroke Center, the Johns Hopkins University, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. She has twice been a Professeure invitée at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, was a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2024 and Principal Investigator on a Sawyer Seminar Grant from the Mellon Foundation from 2024-26. She is the author of “The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side” (2016) and “Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red” (2002).
Daniel Morat
Daniel Morat is curator for the nineteenth century at the New Core Exhibition of the Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM). From 2009 to 2017, he held a Dilthey Fellowship funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation at the Free University Berlin. In 2017, he completed his habilitation there with a study entitled “Der Klang der neuen Zeit. Zum intellektuellen, urbanen und auditiven Erfahrungswandel in der langen Jahrhundertwende 1880–1930”. Since 2023, he has been an adjunct professor of modern and contemporary history at the Free University Berlin. Before joining the DHM in 2022, he worked as a curator for the State of Berlin’s exhibition at the Humboldt Forum. His most recent book publication, co-edited with Christine Gundermann and others, is “Key Terms of Public History” (2025).
Oliver Lubrich
Oliver Lubrich is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Bern and general editor of the Bern Edition of Alexander von Humboldt’s “Collected Writings”. Previously, he held a junior professorship in rhetoric at the Free University Berlin and was a visiting lecturer in Chicago, Long Beach, São Paulo, and Monterrey. He researches testimonies by foreign observers of Nazi Germany and has edited Samuel Beckett’s “German Diaries” (2026), W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Along the Color Line” (2022), and John F. Kennedy’s “Hidden Diary, Europe 1937: The Travel Journals of JFK and Kirk Lemoyne Billings” (2023). His other publications include “Humboldt oder Wie das Reisen das Denken verändert” (2022) and “Botanik in Bewegung. Alexander von Humboldt und die Wissenschaft der Pflanzen” (2019).
Eleanor Jones Harvey
Eleanor Jones Harvey is a senior curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She served as chief curator for the museum’s Luce Foundation Center for American Art from 2003 to 2012. In 2008, she was a fellow at the Center for Curatorial Leadership in New York City. From 1992 to 2002, she was curator of American art at the Dallas Museum of Art. Her research interests include eighteenth-, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art, notably landscape painting, southwestern abstraction and Texas art. She is the curator of “Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture” (2020, Smithsonian American Art Museum). For the accompanying book with the same title, she was awarded the Secretary's Distinguished Research Prize from the Smithsonian Congress of Scholars in 2021.
Tae-Yeoun Keum
Tae-Yeoun Keum is a political theorist based at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and currently a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for the 2026-27 year. Her first book, “Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought” (2022), received the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities and the István Hont Prize for the best book in Intellectual History. She is currently writing a book about Hans Blumenberg, Carl Schmitt, and Jürgen Habermas.
Alexander Etkind
Alexander Etkind is a Senior Research Fellow of the College for Social Sciences and Humanities of the University Alliance Ruhr, Germany. Previously, he was Professor of International Relations at the Central European University, Vienna, where he organized the Open Society Hub for Politics of the Anthropocene (2022-2026), Professor of History at the European University Institute at Florence (2013-2022), and professor at Cambridge University, where he was also a teaching fellow of King’s College (2004-2013). He is the author of – among others – “Russia against Modernity” (2023), “Nature’s Evil. A Cultural History of Natural Resources” (2021), and “Warped Mourning. Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied” (2016).
Jan-Werner Müller
Jan-Werner Müller is Class of 1943 University Professor and Director of the Program in Political Philosophy at Princeton University. He is also a columnist for the Guardian (US). His books include “Street, Palace, Square: The Architecture of Democratic Spaces” (2026), “Democracy Rules. Liberty, Equality, Uncertainty” (2021), “Furcht und Freiheit. Für einen neuen Liberalismus” (2019, Bavarian Book Prize), “What is Populism?” (2017), “Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth Century Europe”(2011), and “A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought” (2003).
Odd Arne Westad
Odd Arne Westad is Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs at Yale University, where he also directs the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School. A historian of the Cold War, modern China, and US-China relations, he previously held appointments at the London School of Economics and Harvard. He is the author of “The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History” (2026), “Restless Empire” (2012, winner of the Asia Society’s Bernard Schwartz Book Award) and “The Global Cold War” (2005, winner of the Bancroft Prize). His next book, “The Hinge: James Bruce and the Remaking of Empire”, is forthcoming in 2027.
Raphael Gross
Raphael Gross is President of the Stiftung Deutsches Historisches Museum and teaches at the faculty of History, Arts and Regional Studies at Leipzig University. From 2015 to 2017, he was director of the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture and holder of the chair for Jewish History and Culture at the University of Leipzig. Among other things, he was director of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main (2006-2015), director of the Leo Baeck Institute, London (2001-2015), and director of the Fritz Bauer Institute, Frankfurt am Main (2007-2015).
His publications include “November 1938. Die Katastrophe vor der Katastrophe” (2013), “Anständig geblieben. Nationalsozialistische Moral” (2010), and “Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The Jewish Question, the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory” (2007).