Across modern European history, social, political, and intellectual movements have attempted to uncover the agency of silenced and marginalised groups. IGES researchers study how contemporary and historical actors reinforce and challenge social norms, how they conceive of deviance and obedience and how they respond to social inequality.
Affiliated IGES scholars
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 Elystan Griffiths is a Reader in German with a research focus on the relationship between social and political inequalities and German culture in the period between 1750 and 1850 and a particular interest in outsider figures.
Dr Katharina Karcher is a Senior Lecturer in German whose work focuses on protest movements and political violence in the 20th and 21st centuries and who has a particular interest in questions of gender, race, class, dis/ability, and political ideology.
Dr Simone Laqua O’Donnell is a Senior Lecturer in European History who is interested in social, cultural and religious history from the early modern to the modern period (16th - 20th century) and who is currently working on networks of radical religious communities and on the role of children in Protestant missions in Britain and Germany.
Current projects
Urban Terrorism in Europe (2004-2019): Remembering, Imagining, and Anticipating Violence, European Research Council Starting Grant, 2019-2024 (Principal Investigator Katharina Karcher)
Recent publications (selection)
Katharina Karcher, ‘The Pleasure and Pain of Passing as (Dis)Abled: Rudi Dutschke’s Exile in the UK (1968–1971) and the Ableism of the West German Student Movement’, New German Critique, 49:3 (2021).
Elystan Griffiths, The Shepherd, the Volk, and the Middle Class: Transformations of Pastoral in German-Language Writing, 1750-1850 (Rochester NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2020).
Elystan Griffiths, ‘Sophie von La Roches Zeitschrift Pomona für Teutschlands Töchter und der literarische Markt der 1780er Jahre im Lichte unveröffentlichter Briefe‘, German Life and Letters, 73:2 (2020): 161-211.
Elystan Griffiths (with Martin Wagner, eds.), ‘Genres of Obedience’, Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, 56:2 (2020): 85-91.
Simone Laqua-O'Donnell, ‘What Debora's letters do: Producing knowledge for the Basel Mission family’, KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, 3:2 (2019): 243-262.
Katharina Karcher, ‘Sisters in Arms?’ – Militant Feminisms in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1968 (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2017). [German edition of the book, translated by Gerhild Ahnert and Annemarie Künzl-Snodgrass, published in September 2018 by Assoziation A]
Charlotte Galpin, Verena K. Brändle and Hans-Jörg Trenz, ‘Marching for Europe? Enacting European citizenship as justice during Brexit.’ Citizenship Studies, 22:8 (2018): 810-828.
Simone Laqua-O'Donnell, ‘Sex, Honour and Morality: About the Precarious Situation of Servant Girls in Post-Tridentine Muenster’, Mélanges de l'École française de Rome-Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines (MEFRIM), 128:2 (2017).
Learn more about the other strands in the IGES research profile