Varieties of Germany. Other Perspectives
Speakers
Len Scales
Len Scales is Professor of Medieval History at Durham University. He has published widely on the history of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages and is the author of The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis 1245–1414 (Cambridge, 2012). He has also written on medieval European history more broadly and is particularly interested in the role of collective identities (nationhood, ethnicity) in European history – on which he co-edited (with Oliver Zimmer) Power and the Nation in European History (Cambridge, 2005). He is currently writing a book examining the mythologisation of medieval (Holy Roman) emperorship in German-speaking Europe from the Middle Ages to the present day, including the role of memory sites, artefacts, and modern exhibition culture.
René Bloch
René Bloch is Professor of Jewish Studies specialising in antiquity and the Middle Ages at the University of Bern. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studied classical philology and Old Testament studies at the University of Basel and the Sorbonne. In 1999, he earned his doctorate with a dissertation on Greco-Roman ethnography and Judaism, and in 2008, he completed his habilitation with a thesis on the Jewish-Hellenistic reception of Greek mythology. Bloch's research focuses primarily on Jewish-Hellenistic literature (Philo of Alexandria, Flavius Josephus), ancient ethnography, the history of antisemitism, ancient mythologies (Israel, Greece, Rome), and the reception of ancient Judaism in modern times. He is the author of several books, including Antike Vorstellungen vom Judentum: Der Judenexkurs des Tacitus im Rahmen der griechisch-römischen Ethnographie (2002), Ancient Jewish Diaspora: Essays on Hellenism (2023), and Les débuts de la philosophie juive dans l'Antiquité (2026, in press).
Philippe Depreux
Philippe Depreux is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Hamburg and a full member of the Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg. Since earning his doctorate, his career has been shaped by German-French collaboration. As a university lecturer in both countries, he has coordinated international study programs and research projects. He directs the long-term project Formulae – Litterae – Chartae in the academy’s program and is preparing a new edition of early medieval certificates and letters, to be published in both print and digital form (see www.formulae.uni-hamburg.de). His forthcoming book, Gouverner l'Empire en Occident, des Carolingiens au règne de Conrad II (737–1039): Symbolique du pouvoir et pratiques sociales, will be published in Paris in the fall of 2025. It explores the basic principles of early medieval rule, with a focus on the symbolism of power, its ideological and legal foundations, and the social dimensions of political life.
Robyn D. Radway
Robyn Dora Radway is Associate Professor of History at Central European University in Vienna. In 2017, she received her PhD from Princeton University and is a specialist in Habsburg central Europe and Ottoman Hungary. She has published on material culture, costume books, arms and armour, and the circulation of ephemeral prints. Her first monograph, Portraits of Empires: Habsburg Albums from the German House in Ottoman Constantinople, won the 2025 Book Prize of the Center for Austrian Studies.
Julia Franke
Julia Franke is a cultural studies scholar and head of Everyday Culture 2 at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. She is also a member of the editorial board of the magazine Historical Judgement and part of the team responsible for the 20th century in the DHM’s new permanent exhibition. She previously worked as a curator and project manager at various institutions, where she organised exhibitions on cultural-historical themes, most recently From Casablanca to Karlshorst at the historic site of the Museum Berlin-Karlshorst. She is also co-curator of the exhibition Roads not Taken, Or: Things Could Have Turned Out Differently, which opened at the DHM in late 2022.
George Njung
Dr. George Njung is Assistant Professor of World Cultures and African History at Baylor University in Texas, USA. His research and teaching explore the intersections of colonialism, gendered violence, military history, and displacement in Africa. He has written extensively on topics such as colonial rule in West and Central Africa, the experiences of West African soldiers and disabled ex-servicemen during and after the First World War, crises of masculinity, and the histories of African migrants and refugees. His scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals, including The Canadian Journal of African Studies, First World War Studies, Africa Today, The Journal of Social History, and The American Historical Review. Dr. Njung’s forthcoming monograph, Violent Encounters: Gender, Colonialism, and the First World War in German Cameroon, 1884–1916, will be published by Ohio University Press in 2026.
Agnieszka Pufelska
Agnieszka Pufelska is a Polish-German cultural and intellectual historian. Since 2016, she has been a research associate at the Institute for the Culture and History of Germans in Northeast Europe at the University of Hamburg in Lüneburg. She studied German language and literature as well as cultural studies at the State University of Applied Sciences in Płock, Poland, the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), and Tel Aviv University. In 2005, she received her doctorate from Viadrina with a dissertation on antisemitism in Poland, and in 2015, she completed her habilitation at the University of Potsdam with a thesis on Polish perceptions of Prussia during the Enlightenment. In 2020–21, after several teaching assignments, notably in Buenos Aires, she was a visiting professor at the Institute for Eastern European History at the University of Vienna. In 2023, she was awarded the Jubilee Prize for Science by the Stiftung Preußische Seehandlung, and in 2024, she became a full member of the Historical Commission of Berlin. Her research focuses on Jewish cultural history in East-Central Europe, theoretical and methodological approaches to colonial history in the context of Eastern and East-Central Europe, and Prussian history conceived as a history of entanglements.
Liliane Weissberg
Liliane Weissberg is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and has also taught as a visiting professor at universities in the United States, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. She has received numerous awards for her scholarship, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Graz. Her books include Benjamin Veitel Ephraim: Kaufmann, Schriftsteller, Geheimagent (2021) and Die herrliche Disciplin: Michael Bernays und die Anfänge der Neugermanistik in München (with Ernst Osterkamp, 2024). In 2024, she curated the exhibition What Is Enlightenment? Questions for the 18th Century at the German Historical Museum.
Matthias Struch
Matthias Struch is an art and film historian who directs the Poster and Postcards Collection at the Deutsches Historisches Museum. He is a member of the editorial board of the magazine Historical Judgement and part of the team responsible for the 20th-century in the DHM’s new permanent exhibition. He previously worked as a curator at the Filmmuseum Potsdam and later as Head of Collections at the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, where he participated in the joint project Digitisation and Cataloguing of the Leni Riefenstahl Collection in cooperation with the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (State Museums of Berlin and Ethnological Museum) and the Berlin State Library. His research focuses on historical imagery.
Volha Bartash
Volha Bartash is a research associate at the University of Münster, where she works on the collaborative project Romani Migration between Germany and Britain (1880s–1914): Spaces of Informal Business, Media Spectacle, and Racial Policing. The initiative is jointly funded by the German Research Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She is also a research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg. Her book Survival as a Daily Routine: Roma in the German-Occupied Belarusian-Lithuanian Border Region will be published shortly.
Young-sun Hong
Young-sun Hong is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is the author of Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Harvard Center for European Studies, and New York University’s International Center for Advanced Studies. She has also received fellowships from the German Marshall Fund, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Max Planck Institute. She has contributed to debates on transnationalism as part of the German History Forum on Asia, Germany, and the Transnational Turn (2010) and the H-German Forum on Transnationalism (2006). She has also served on the editorial board of Social History.
Baijayanti Roy
Dr. Baijayanti Roy is a lecturer and researcher affiliated with the Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. She received her PhD there in 2014 and her dissertation was published as a monograph titled The Making of a Gentleman Nazi: Albert Speer’s Politics of History in the Federal Republic of Germany (Peter Lang, 2016). She has published and spoken on a variety of subjects, including Nazi Germany, Hindu nationalism, German Indology, and the history of German-Indian relations. Her second monograph, The Nazi Study of India and Indian Anti-Colonialism: Knowledge Providers and Propagandists in the Third Reich, was published by Oxford University Press in November 2024.
Ulrike Kretzschmar
Ulrike Kretzschmar is Director of Exhibitions and Deputy President of the Deutsches Historisches Museum. She has been with the museum since its founding in 1987 and in 1991 became Director of Museum Organization, Exhibitions, and Events. As building projects officer, she oversaw the renovation, restoration, and reconstruction of the Zeughaus complex with its five properties: the administration building, two workshop and storage buildings, the Zeughaus itself, and the building for temporary exhibitions. She was also responsible for the construction of the new temporary exhibitions building, designed by architect I. M. Pei. Kretzschmar serves on numerous advisory committees and boards of trustees, including the supervisory board of Kulturprojekte Berlin, the board of trustees of both the German Museum of Technology Foundation and the Berlin City Museum, and the academic advisory board of the Bundeswehr Centre of Military History and Social Sciences. She also chairs the board of the Allied Museum and has served as both deputy chair and chair of the board of the Berlin-Karlshorst Museum.
Neil MacGregor
Neil MacGregor is an art historian, writer, and broadcaster. He directed the National Gallery, London, from 1987 to 2002 and the British Museum from 2002 to 2015. From 2015 to 2018, he served as Founding Director of the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, and is now an advisor to the J. Paul Getty Foundation in Los Angeles and the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai. In 2021, he held the Chaire du Louvre at the Musée du Louvre in Paris. He is currently working on a major project in Mumbai to present a new history of the ancient world – as seen from India – co-curated with the CSMVS, the British Museum, and the State Museums in Berlin. His publications include Seeing Salvation (2000); A History of the World in 100 Objects (2011); Germany: Memories of a Nation (2014); Living with the Gods (2018); and À monde nouveau, nouveaux musées (2021).
Raphael Gross
Raphael Gross is currently President of the Foundation Deutsches Historisches Museum and teaches at the Faculty of History, Arts and Area Studies at Leipzig University. Previously he was the 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 since 2015. He was also director of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt am Main (2006-2015), director of the Leo Baeck Institute, London (2001-2015), and served as 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), “Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The Jewish Question, the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory” (2007).