David Blackbourn will be coming to speak in the Seminar in Cultural History Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 on: “Germany in the World, 1600-2000: Thinking about a new project.”

David Blackbourn is currently Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University, where he has taught since 1992. He received his B.A. Double First-Class Honors from Cambridge University, and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University. From 1989-1990 he was the Visiting Kratter Professor of History at Stanford. He held the positions of Lecturer in History, Reader in Modern History and Professor of Modern European History at Birkbeck College, London from 1979-1992 and from 1976-1979 he held the position of Lecturer in History at Queen Mary College, London.

Professor Blackbourn has received numerous awards and honors including being named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007, a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow at Harvard from 2003-2004 and President of the Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association in 2003. From 1994-1995 he was a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and in 1987 a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Dr. Blackbourn has also received a number of prizes, the most recent being the Prize for Best Book in European History (2007).

Dr. Blackbourn has written and contributed to 10 books including most recently: Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place, with James Retallack, co-editor, (University of Toronto Press, 2007); and The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany. (W. W. Norton, New York, June 2006) for which he received the George L. Mosse Prize of the American Historical Association, the Best Book in European History Prize) from Humanities. Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Prize of the Forest History Society for the Best Book in Forest and Conservation History; The Fontana History of Germany: The Long Nineteenth Century, 1780-1918. (HarperCollins, London, April 1997); Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany. (Alfred Knopf, New York, September 1994).

Professor Blackbourn will give a talk entitled “Germany in the World, 1600-2000: Thinking about a new project:”

“History occurs in space as well as time, and the history of nations does not take place only within their borders. People, goods, ideas and epidemics as well as armies cross those borders. I want to reflect on a new project that will try to bring together different aspects of Germany (or Germans) in the world, looking not only at political dimensions but at commodity flows, migration, cultural transfers, ecological exchanges, travel and exploration. What would be the gains from such a project; how might it be organized?”

Please join us in the Lecture Hall at the Bard Graduate Center at 5:45pm for a light reception before the talk. Bard Graduate Center is located at 38 West 86th Street, between Columbus Ave and Central Park West.