Research profiles and projects

Dr Andrea I Frank is Associate Professor in Urban and Regional Planning with research interest in sustainable urban development and comparing spatial planning practices and cultures in Europe; she has also expertise in planning education pathways in HE across the EHEA.

Dr Charlotte Galpin is a Senior Lecturer in German and European Politics. Her research is concerned with European identities, EU citizenship, Euroscepticism and the European public sphere.

Dr Armin Grünbacher is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History. His main interest lies in post war Germany and the political, social and economic reconstruction of the country (including Allied occupation policy) against the backdrop of the Cold War.

Dr Tim Haughton is a Reader in European Politics with a particular interest in electoral and party politics, electoral campaigning, the relationship between politics and government, the interaction between domestic and European sources of change, the relationship between Britain and the EU, the role of the past in the politics of the present and the domestic politics of Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

Dr Julian Hoerner is a Lecturer in Politics at POLSIS. His research focuses on the interaction of electoral behaviour and political institutions in shaping representation, accountability, and the quality of democracy in Europe. He also has an interest the impact of historical legacies on contemporary politics. Before joining POLSIS, Julian was a Senior Research Analyst covering the EU and Germany at the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Dr Julian Pänke is a Lecturer in European Politics who is interested in comparative foreign policy analysis, in German and East Central European politics, the impact of history on foreign policy making and specifically how tensions between nation- and empire building shape a state’s external behaviour.

Dr Jost-Henrik Morgenstern-Pomorski is DAAD Lecturer in European Politics with research expertise in European foreign policy and in the European External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic service.

Dr Maren Rohe is a post-doctoral Research Fellow in the project ‘Post-Socialist Britain: Memory, Representation and Political Identity amongst German and Polish Immigrants in the UK.’

Corey Ross is a Professor of Modern History. His primary research interests are in global environmental history and modern European social and cultural history.

Frank Uekötter is a Professor in Environmental Humanities working on environmental issues, both past and present, in a global context.

Current projects

Futures of German Diasporas, DAAD, 2022-2023 (Principal Investigator Dr Klaus Richter)

The Making of Monoculture: A Global History, European Research Council Advanced Grant, 2021-2026 (Principal Investigator Dr Frank Uekötter)

Post-Truth Politics, Nationalism and the (De-)Legitimation of European Integration, Jean Monnet Network, 2019-2022 (Co-Investigator Dr Charlotte Galpin)

Julian Pänke, ‘“The Fourth Reich Is Here”: An Exploration of Populist Depictions of the European Union as a German Plot to Take Over Europe’, German Politics and Society 38:3 (2020): 54–76.

Frank Uekötter, Im Strudel: Eine Umweltgeschichte der modernen Welt (Frankfurt: Campus, 2020).

Frank Uekötter, Der deutsche Kanal: Eine Mythologie der alten Bundesrepublik (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2020).

Maren Rohe, ‘Is Germany Part of the West? A Reconstruction of Russian Narratives.’ German Politics and Society, 38:3 (2020).

Charlotte Galpin and Hans-Jörg Trenz, ‘Converging towards Euroscepticism? Negativity in News Coverage During the 2014 European Parliament Elections in Germany and the UK’. European Politics and Society, Vol. 20:3 (2019): 260-276.

Charlotte Galpin, Patrick Bijsmans and Benjamin Leruth, ‘“Brexit” in Transnational Perspective: An Analysis of Newspapers in France, Germany and the Netherlands.’ Comparative European Politics, Vol. 16:5, (2018): 825-842.

Jost-Henrik Morgenstern-Pomorski, Contested Diplomacy of the European External Action Service: The Inception, Establishment and Consolidation (London: Routledge, 2018).

Frank Uekötter, ‘Entangled Ecologies. Outlines of a Green History of Two or More Germanys,’ In Frank Bösch (ed.), A History Shared and Divided. East and West Germany since the 1970s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018): 147-190.

Charlotte Galpin: The Euro Crisis and European Identities: Political and Media Discourse in Germany, Ireland and Poland. New Perspectives in German Political Studies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

Armin Grünbacher, West German industrialists and the Making of the Economic Miracle: A History of Mentality and Recovery. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)

Corey Ross, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire: Europe and the Transformation of the Tropical World (Oxford University Press: 2017)

Dr Thomas Brodie is a Lecturer in 20th Century European History whose research primarily addresses the social and cultural histories of Nazi Germany, with a particular focus on the period of the Second World War and its aftermaths.

Dr Julian Hoerner is a Lecturer in Politics at POLSIS. His research focuses on the interaction of electoral behaviour and political institutions in shaping representation, accountability, and the quality of democracy in Europe. He also has an interest the impact of historical legacies on contemporary politics. Before joining POLSIS, Julian was a Senior Research Analyst covering the EU and Germany at the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

Prof Sara Jones is Professor in the Department of Modern Languages. Her current research analyses the political, social and cultural processes of remembering state socialist dictatorship.

Dr Maria Roca Lizarazu is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Modern Languages within LCAHM, specialising in contemporary German-language literatures of (post-)migration, German Jewish literature and culture, Holocaust literatures, and Memory studies.

Dr Nicholas Martin is a Reader in European Intellectual History who researches modern intellectual history, in particular the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and their reception, as well as the cultural history of war, terrorism and political violence in modern Germany.

Dr David Zell is an Associate Research Fellow interested in cultural commemorations and the construction of cultural and political identity in the GDR.

Testimony in Practice, Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2019-2020 (Principal Investigator Sara Jones)

Maria Roca Lizarazu, ‘Moments of Possibility: Holocaust Postmemory, Subjunctivity, and Futurity in Katja Petrowskaja’s Vielleicht Esther (2014) und Robert Menasse’s Die Hauptstadt (2017)’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 56:4 (2021), pp. 406-426.

Sara Jones, Using Testimony in the Classroom: Guidance for Teachers, 2020.

Maria Roca Lizarazu, Renegotiating Postmemory: The Holocaust in Contemporary German-language Jewish Literature (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2020)

Sara Jones, Testimony through culture: towards a theoretical framework, Rethinking History, 2019, 23:3: 257-278.

Thomas Brodie, German Catholicism at war, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Nicholas Martin, ‘War in peace: Pacifist and anti-war writing in the battle for control of German Great War memory, 1927–1930’, in Pacifist and Anti-Militarist Writing in German, 1889–1928: From Bertha von Suttner to Erich Maria Remarque. Eds. Ritchie Robertson and Andreas Kramer (Munich: Iudicium, 2018): 292-303.

Dr Jonathan Gumz is a Reader in International History, whose intellectual interests focus on Modern Central and Eastern Europe, modern international history, global insurgency and counterinsurgency, as well as international law and the regulation of war.

Dr Tim Haughton is a Reader in European Politics with a particular interest in electoral and party politics, electoral campaigning, the relationship between politics and government, the interaction between domestic and European sources of change, the relationship between Britain and the EU, the role of the past in the politics of the present and the domestic politics of Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic.

Prof Sara Jones is Professor in the Department of Modern Languages. Her current research analyses the political, social and cultural processes of remembering state socialist dictatorship.

Dr Deema Kaneff is a Reader in Social Anthropology with specific interest in Bulgaria and Ukraine. Her research is based on carrying out ethnographic fieldwork in particular rural and urban sites in for protracted periods of time (amounting to a number of years).

Dr Anca Mandru is a Research Fellow interested in pre-World War Two socialism and nationalism, cultural history and the history of science, whose research focuses on Eastern Europe, particularly Romania.

Dr Jasmin Nithammer is a Research Fellow whose work focuses on the international, social, and economic history of interwar and postwar East Central Europe (especially Poland).

Dr Julian Pänke is a Lecturer in European Politics who is interested in comparative foreign policy analysis, in German and East Central European politics, the impact of history on foreign policy making and specifically how tensions between nation- and empire building shape a state’s external behaviour.

Dr Klaus Richter is a Birmingham Fellow and Reader in Eastern European History whose main field of research is the social history of modern Poland, the Baltics and Russia, with special interest in issues such as nationalism, ethnic conflict and concepts of political economy and statehood.

Dr Graham Timmins is a Reader in International Politics, who is a specialist on European integration with a particular focus on the external relations and foreign policy role of the European Union.

Dr Tara Talwar Windsor is a cultural and literary historian of modern Germany and Europe, currently working as Research Fellow on the project ‘Knowing the Secret Police: Secrecy and Knowledge in East German Society’.

The First World War and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire, National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, 2022-2024 (Co-Investigator Jonathan Gumz, Principle Investigator John Deak / University of Notre Dame)

The Liminality of Failing Democracy: East Central Europe and the Interwar Slump, Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung, 2021-2024 (Principal Investigator Klaus Richter, Research Fellows Anca Mandru and Jasmin Nithammer)

Knowing the Secret Police: Secrecy and Knowledge in East German Society, Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2018-2021 (Co-Investigator Sara Jones, Research Fellow Tara Talwar Windsor)

The Fight against the Traffic in Women and Children in Interwar Poland, Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung, 2018-2021 (Principal Investigator Klaus Richter, Research Fellow Jasmin Nithammer)

Hinterlands and Hypertrophies. Assessments of the “Viability” of Empires and Nation-States in Central and Eastern Europe, 1900 – 1930's, Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2017-2020 (Principal investigator Klaus Richter, Co-Investigator Jonathan Gumz)

Deema Kaneff, The market is far away': Global connections and economic remoteness in rural Ukraine. Europe-Asia Studies, 73, 3 (2021): 451-71.

Timothy Haughton and Kevan Deegan-Krause, The new party challenge: Changing cycles of party birth and death in Central Europe and beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Klaus Richter, Fragmentation in East Central Europe: Poland and the Baltics, 1915-1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

Timothy Haughton and David Cutts, Winning votes and influencing people: Campaigning in Central and Eastern Europe, East European Politics, 2020.

Julian Pänke, Liberal Empire, Geopolitics and EU Strategy: Norms and Interests in European Foreign Policy Making, Geopolitics, 24:1 (2019), 100–123.

Jasmin Nithammer, Grenzen des Sozialismus zu Land und zu Wasser. Die tschechoslowakische Landgrenze und polnische Seegrenze im Vergleich (Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2019).

Jonathan Gumz and John Deak, How to break a state: the Habsburg Monarchy's internal war. The American Historical Review, 122:4 (2017): 1105–1136.