Katrin Bahr is a Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Centre College. Her dissertation focused on the everyday life of East German citizens in Mozambique during the 1980s. In 2018 and 2019 she curated the exhibition “East Germany in Mozambique: Private Photographs of a Forgotten Time” which was shown in the USA, Mozambique, and Germany. She has also published on the question of the Third Generation in literature, on private photographs as part of the depiction of the everyday life experience of East Germans in Mozambique, and on the question of GDR studies within German Studies. Read article
Franziska Baum studies Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Germany, where she is writing her master’s thesis on issues of precarity and masculinity. Her research interests include new forms of work within digital capitalism and logistics, labor struggles, and gender relations. She currently works as a research assistant at the Institute for Social Sciences at Humboldt-Universität. Franziska was born in West Berlin in 1984 as the daughter of a West German journalist who worked as a correspondent in the GDR and an East German librarian who had applied to immigrate to the FRG in 1980. She was able to travel between the two German states in her youth, which makes her question her belonging to this day. Read article
Katja H. Brunk was born and raised in the GDR. Having worked as a marketing practitioner for many years, she joined academia to pursue her passion for research and is currently Professor of Marketing at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany. She holds an MBA as well as a Ph.D. in Management Science from the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Université Libre de Bruxelles, in Belgium. Her research interests focus on consumer behavior and the phenomena of consumption culture. Together with her co-authors Benjamin J. Hartmann and Markus Giesler, she has published numerous articles on the topics of memory-making, nostalgia, retro branding and (re-)enchantment, whereby leveraging the unique socio-historic context of the German reunification for theory building in marketing and management. Read article
Stephan Ehrig is a Teaching Fellow in German at Durham University, UK. Before joining Durham, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Modern Language Research, University of London. He wrote his PhD thesis on the reception of Heinrich von Kleist in GDR literature and theatre at the University of Bristol. He is part of the network ‘Literature in divided Germany’ based at Berlin’s Humboldt University. His monograph Der dialektische Kleist will be published in February 2018, and the co-edited volume The GDR Today – New Interdisciplinary Perspectives on East German History, Memory and Culture will be coming out in spring 2018. Read article
Markus Giesler was born and raised in Iserlohn, West Germany and studied business, economics, and sociology at Witten/Herdecke University. After his Ph.D. in Witten and Stockholm and a visiting scholarship at the Kellogg School of Management, he moved to York University’s Schulich School of Business where he draws on a sociological lens to study market creation customer experience design as Associate Professor of Marketing. He is also the director of the Big Design Lab, a think tank that helps companies connect with consumers. Read article
Daniel Kubiak holds an M.A. in Social Sciences from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in Germany, where he is currently writing his dissertation on matters of West and East German identity and identification. He also works and teaches at Humboldt-Universität. In 2012 and 2013, he and Sandra Matthäus organized a discussion series about East Germany. One outcome was their publication of the anthology Der Osten – Neue sozialwissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf einen Gegenstand jenseits von Verurteilung und Verklärung in 2016 with Springer VS. Read article
Benjamin J. Hartmann was born and raised in (West) Berlin and now lives in the Gothenburg area in Sweden where he is Associate Professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law, at the University of Gothenburg. He holds a MA in International Marketing and Brand Management from Lund University and a Diplom-Kaufmann from Technical University in Berlin. Benjamin is an active musician, has experience in marketing and innovation consulting, and research studies marketing at the nexus of consumption, markets, and society. Benjamin and Katja met at a research seminar in 2008 in Brussels, where they immediately teamed up to explore the German GDR nostalgia market from a West/East German perspective. Read article
Nicolas Hausdorf is an editor, analyst and essayist living in Melbourne, Australia. He holds an MA in International Relations from Goldsmiths University of London. He has written about the intersection of culture, sociology, geopolitics and technology for publications including Vice Magazine, Motherboard magazine, Berlin Art Link, Arena Magazine, Cobra Res, the Hong Kong Review of Books, and Jacobite Magazine. Superstructural Berlin, an experimental sociology of Berlin (designed by Alexander Goller) has been published with Zero Books in 2015. Read article
Daniela Müller is a doctoral candidate at the School of Languages in Linguistics at the University of Melbourne and writes her thesis on gender bias of art collections emerging from mental asylums in Germany and Australia. She holds an MA in Art History and German Literature from the Technical University (TU) of Berlin and the University of Potsdam. Daniela taught German language, literature, and culture in Barcelona and Colombia before moving to Australia in 2015, where she was the DAAD lecturer (German Academic Exchange Service) in German Studies at the University of Melbourne until 2021. Read article
Kristina Pilz is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Germanics at the University of Washington and native of Dresden, Germany. Her research is guided by her larger interest in Poetry and Poetics, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, Postcolonial, as well as Race and Ethnicity Studies. These interests inform her focus on German literature from the late 19th to the 21st century. In March 2019, she defended her dissertation on Afro-German poetry and autobiography, entitled Writing Across Margins: Contemporary Afro-German Literature. She argues that Afro-German literature functions as aesthetic activism by creating collective identity through textual practices. Read article
Claudia Sandberg is a film historian and filmmaker who works at the University of Melbourne in the School of Languages and Linguistics as Senior Research and Teaching Fellow. Her research focuses on German cinema, transnational cinematic relations between Europe and Latin America, women filmmaking and questions of exile and migration in film. One of her most recent projects traces the participation of Chilean film personnel in German cinema East and West during the Cold War era. She made the feature-length Películas escondidas. Un viaje entre el exilio y la memoria (in collaboration with Alejandro Areal Vélez, 2016), a documentary that examines DEFA ‘Chile’ films as part of the audio-visual documentation of the Pinochet dictatorship. Claudia co-edited the volume Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Resisting Neoliberalism? (2018) together with Carolina Rocha and is currently working on a monograph about German-Jewish-Uruguayan filmmaker Peter Lilienthal. Read article