2025
German History Society Annual Conference 2025
Loughborough University (Loughborough Campus)
Thursday 4 September – Saturday 6 September 2025
REGISTRATION HAS NOW CLOSED
Please use the hashtag #GermanHistSoc2025 on social media to keep engaged!
If you have any queries on registration, accommodation, or the conference dinner please contact Dr Paul Maddrell at [email protected]
The German History Society annual conference, held at Loughborough University, is now open for registration. The theme for this year’s conference will be “Protest and Populism,” and confirmed keynote speakers addressing this theme include James Brophy, Lyndal Roper and Paul Nolte.
Please note that panellists/individual presenters will have to bear the costs of the dinner, travel and accommodation themselves. Some bursaries will be available for postgraduate students; those presenting papers will receive preference for funding. Information on applying for postgraduate bursaries is available on the German History Society website: https://www.germanhistorysociety.org/postgraduate-ecr-funding/
The conference is free for members of the German History Society. There will be a modest conference fee of £25 (waged) and £8 (unwaged) for delegates who are not members of the German History Society. For details on how to join the German History Society (which also offers additional benefits, including the right to apply for our various grant schemes, and free subscription to the society’s journal, German History), see http://www.germanhistorysociety.org/membership
Programme
Thursday Afternoon Pre-Session
2–4pm GHS COMMITTEE MEETING (EHB 205)
4–c.5.30pm GERMAN HISTORY EDITORIAL BOARD MEETING (EHB 202)
4–c.5pm PUBLICATION / GRANT-WRITING WORKSHOP for postgraduates and ECRs (EHB 205)
Thursday Evening Session
5–6pm Registration opens (EHB Atrium)
6–7.15pm KEYNOTE LECTURE: Lyndal Roper (University of Oxford)
Location: EHB 1.04
‘Turbulence and the German Peasants’ War of 1525’
7.15–8.15pm Wine Reception (EHB Atrium)
Friday Morning Session 1: 9.00–10.45am
Panel 1 – Cultures and Sub-cultures in Germany
Chair: Marcus Collins (Loughborough)
Location: EHB 205
Leonie Bausch (University of Nottingham), ‘Sex with the (Former) Enemy: Intimacy, Entertainment, and Conflict in French-Occupied Germany after WW2’
Claire MacLeod (University of Oxford), “Beyond the ‘Heloïse Complex’: Hannah Arendt, Edith Stein, and Elisabeth Blochmann as Historical Case Studies in Academic Mentorship”
Panel 2 – National Socialism and Its Aftermath
Chair: Caroline Sharples (Roehampton)
Location: EHB 110A
Lewis Champion (Royal Holloway, University of London), ‘932 Lives: Uncovering the Persecution of Homosexual Men in Nazi Concentration Camps Through Archival Data’
Jenna Byers (University College London), “Hitler’s Legacy: Similarities between Hitler’s attitude to women and modern ‘incel’ terrorist depictions of ‘femoids’”
Georgia Whittacker (The University of Western Australia), ‘A New Terrain of Insecurity: Jewish Child Survivors’ Experience of Antisemitism in the Postwar German States’
Panel 3 – The First World War
Chair: Marina Pérez de Arcos (Oxford/LSE)
Location: EHB 104
Mathis Gronau (Independent Scholar), ‘A No-Man’s-Land of Identity: The Experiences of German Minorities in France and Great Britain between 1914 and 1924’
Hiroaki Murakami (University of Tsukuba), ‘War Experience of Non-ordinary People: Tuberculosis Patients during the First World War’
Jonathan Slater (LSE), ‘Ersatz food regulation and the paradox of government intervention in Germany during the First World War’
10.45-11.15am Tea/Coffee Break
EHB Atrium
Friday Morning Session 2: 11.15am–12.45pm
Panel 4 – Media, History and the Eichmann Trial in East and West Germany
Chair: Tetyana Pavlush (Cardiff University)
Location: EHB 202
Florine Miez (Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, Munich), ‘Media, Trials of National Socialist Perpetrators in the West and East German Press: An Analysis of the Eichmann Trial’
Joscha Döpp (Fritz Bauer Institut, Frankfurt am Main), ‘Confronting the Past: Henry Ormond’s Public Media Interventions in Postwar Germany’
Lisa Städtler (Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Kiel), ‘Das Magazin, its authors and the question of history: A popular East German window on the past?’
Paul Moore (University of Leicester), “‘This Man Represents all of Germany’: Bild-Zeitung, Eichmann and Popular History in the Federal Republic’
Panel 5 – Monarchy and Empire
Chair: Mark Hewitson (UCL)
Location: EHB 205
Michael Phillips (Independent Scholar), ‘From Opposition to Acclamation: The Transformation of the Prussian Army 1860–1875’
Parveen Kanhai (Independent Scholar), ‘From Temple to Circus Tent: Popular Orientalism in Hagenbeck’s Sri Lankan and Indian Ethnic Shows (1883–1930)’
Ivo van Donselaar (University of Münster/Radboud University Nijmegen), ‘Pan-Germanicism from outside: Hopes and Fears between Tribal Relatives, 1880–1945’
Panel 6 – Social and Political Thought
Chair: TBC
Location: EHB 110A
Stanisław Banach (University of Cambridge), ‘The Medieval Preacher as Populist Politician: Nicolaus Tempelfeld and the Internal Politics of Breslau, 1457–67’
Petar Ćurčić (Institute of European Studies, Belgrade), ‘Werner Sombart, Capitalism and the Conception of the Social Movement: From the Social Reformist Critique of the Wilhelminism to Elitist Anti-capitalism (1888–1907)’
Aileen Lichtenstein (University of Warwick), ‘German Anarchist Newspapers as a Form of Counter-Hegemonic Internationalism’
Panel 7 – Coal and its Consequences across Cold War Borders
Chair: James Bjork (King’s College London)
Location: EHB 104
Discussant: Frank Uekötter (Chair for the History of Technology and Environmental History, Department of History, Ruhr University, Bochum)
Andrew Demshuk (American University, Washington, DC), Which Village will Die? The Politics of Pollution in East and West German Lignite Peripheries
Torsten Meyer (Deutsches Bergbau-Museum, Bochum), The Lusatian lignite mining area – a ‘blossoming landscape’? – The IBA “Fürst-Pückler-Land” and its promises of valorisation for the former coal and energy centre of the GDR
Nikolas Weyland (Harvard University, Cambridge), Energetic Reconstruction: The Ruhr, Reparations, and Repatriation to Poland in the Early Post-WWII Period
Lunch 12.45–2 pm
EHB Atrium
Friday Afternoon Session: 1: 2–3.30pm
Panel 8 – Gender in the GDR and FRG
Chair: Chris Dillon (KCL)
Location: EHB 202
Hannah Cogan (King’s College London), ‘The Denazification of Women in the British Occupation Zone of Postwar Germany, 1945–1955’
Anna McEwan (Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam), ‘Ambivalent Agents: When Can Women Choose? Abortion, Activism, and the Democratic Women’s League of Germany’s Shifting Ideologies (1960–1995)’
Anja Segmueller (Cambridge), ‘Bodies That Protest: Feminist Art and Performative Dissent in Late Socialist East Germany’
Panel 9 – The State, the Law and the People in the Nineteenth Century
Chair: Anna Ross (University of Sheffield)
Location: EHB 205
Charlotte Johann (QMUL), ‘The German Legal Imagination between Imperial Constitutionalism and International Law, 1806–1900’
Jean-Michel Johnston (Cambridge), ‘Between Self-Determination and Democracy: “The People” and Statehood in German-Speaking Central Europe, 1850–1870.
Bethany McNamara-Dale (Oxford), ‘Democracy and Constitutionalism in the German Confederation: Kurhessen’s Crises and the Hassenpflug Era(s) (1831–62)’
Panel 10 – Secret Services in Twentieth-Century German History
Chair: Thoralf Klein (Loughborough University)
Location: EHB 110A
Patrick Major (University of Reading), ‘Allied Intelligence on the German Home Front in World War Two’
Paul Maddrell (Loughborough University), ‘The Stasi in the History of the Cold War’
Mark Fennemore (Manchester Metropolitan University), ‘Listening to What the “silent war” had to Say: (Re)defining Subversive Warfare in Cold War Berlin’
Panel 11 – GHS Outreach and Impact Grant Panel: Elite-School Pupils and War Games in Nazi Germany
Location: EHB 104
Helen Roche (Durham University) and Alexander Chisholm-Loxley, ‘Exploring Forgotten Voices of Former Nazi Elite-School Pupils’ (Film Screening)
Ben Shepherd (Glasgow Caledonian University), “Mercy Squad: An Education Experience on Perpetrators and Protectors in the Nazi ‘War of Annihilation’ against the Soviet Union”
3.30-4pm Tea/Coffee Break
EHB Atrium
Friday Afternoon Session 2: 4–5.30pm
Panel 12 – Teaching the GDR Today – Roundtable
Chair: Ned Richardson-Little (Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam [ZZF])
Location: EHB 205
Anna Saunders (University of Liverpool)
Sebastian Gehrig (University of Sheffield)
Andrew Demshuk (American University)
Emily Steinhauer (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Panel 13 – Nazi Carceral Space
Chair: Paul Moore (University of Leicester)
Location: EHB 110A
Hannah Wilson (University of Manchester), ‘From Nazi Carceral Spaces to the Family Home: The Material Archive of Sobibor Survivors Chaim Engel and Selma Wijnberg-Engel’
Désirée Hotz (King’s College London), ‘SA-Camp Hochkreuz: A Case Study of Early Violence’
Karianne Hansen (ARKIVET Peace and Human Rights Centre), ‘From State Archive to a Temporal Nazi Carceral Space: The Case of the Gestapo Headquarters in Kristiansand, Norway’
Panel 14 – Democracy in German Lands, 1780–1870
Chair: Mark Philp (Warwick/Oxford)
Location: EHB 104
Anne Heyer (Leiden University), ‘Hanseatic tradition of Demokratie? The meaning of democracy in the cities of Bremen, Hamburg and Lübeck’
Theo Jung (Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg), ‘Prussian Democracy? Territorial Variations in a Complex State (1815–1870)’
Jean-Michel Johnson (Cambridge), ‘German Discourse on Democracy in the 1860s’
6–7.15pm KEYNOTE LECTURE: Paul Nolte (FU Berlin)
Location: EHB 104
Spectres of the Nazi Past? Or: How Much German History Lingers in Germany’s New Right-Wing Populism
7.30–10pm Conference Dinner
Tarboush, 12A Market Street, Loughborough, LE11 3EP
Saturday Morning Session 1: 9–10.30am
Panel 15 – Material Culture in Early Modern Bavaria
Chair: Roisin Watson (Open University)
Location: EHB 202
Stuart Moss (UCL), ‘Material Memories: A Rococo Abbot’s Crozier and the Bavarian Secularisation of 1803’
Amelia Hutchinson (Cambridge), ‘Material Culture in Early Modern Bavaria’
Sophia Feist (Cambridge), ‘Tailoring Politics: Collaboration between artisan workshops at the courts of Wilhelm IV and Ludwig X’
Panel 16 – Power and Economics in the GDR
Chair: Paul Maddrell (Loughborough)
Location: EHB 205
Chris Law (Newcastle University/Berlin Wall Foundation), ‘Guarded Memory: The GDR Border Regime and Enrolment in Post-Reunification Erinnerungskulturen’
Kayla Berg (King’s College London), ‘Lingering Influences from the Cold War: Stasi Psychology in Foreign Intelligence Gathering, 1961–1990’
Peter Nunes (McGill University), “‘We are Making Debts with the Capitalists to the Limit of the Possible’: Technical Modernization and the Origins of the East German Debt Crisis, 1968–1982”
Panel 17 – Rethinking German Politics
Chair: Mark Hewitson (UCL)
Location: EHB 110A
Claudia Kreklau (St Andrews), ‘Rethinking the German Empire: Echoes, Rhymes and Paradoxes’
Matthew Stibbe (Sheffield Hallam University), ‘A Shoaling, not a Schooling: The SPD and Enabling Acts in pre-1933 Germany’
Katherine Quinlan-Flatter (Independent Scholar), ‘The Populist Tactics of the Referendum: The Annexation of Austria in 1938’
Panel 18 – Mercy Squad
Location: EHB 104
Lead: Ben Shepherd (Glasgow Caledonian University)
An interactive game about Nazi Germany and the Second World War
10.30-11am Tea/Coffee Break
EHB Atrium
11.15-12.30 KEYNOTE LECTURE: James Brophy (University of Delaware)
Location: EHB 104
‘Populism avant la lettre? Popular Protest in Nineteenth-Century Germany’
12.30-1.30pm Lunch
EHB Atrium
1.30-2.30pm Annual General Meeting of the German History Society
Many thanks to the Conference Team in Loughborough, especially Dr Paul Maddrell.
Campus Map and Directions
The conference will take place in the Edward Herbert Building (No.62 on the attached map).
The delegates will sleep in the hall of residence: Claudia Parsons (No.35).
Breakfast will be served in the Elite Athletic Centre (numbered 36).
Delegates can reach the campus from the railway station by bus. Please click here to view the relevant bus timetable. Delegates should alight at Student Accommodation Centre (No.49)
After alighting, they should walk down Margaret Keay Road to Claudia Parsons. To reach the Edward Herbert Building, they should walk back up the hill, using Margaret Keay Road
Please note, that since the conference is taking place outside of term time, the last bus will leave the railway station at 6pm.
Route to Conference Meal
The conference dinner will be held at Tarboush, 12A Market Street, Loughborough. This map shows the best routes, by car and on foot, from the Edward Herbert Building to Tarboush.
If you are going by car, turn left out of the main entrance to the university, drive to the first roundabout, and then turn right. Drive down Ashby Road until it runs into Market Street. Tarboush is on the right-hand side of Market Street.
If you are going on foot, turn right out of the main entrance to the university, cross Epinal Way (shown as the A6004 on the map) and take the first turning left. Go past Loughborough College until you reach Radmoor Road. Walk down Radmoor Road until it meets Ashby Road. Then turn right and walk down Ashby Road until it runs into Market Street.
