Oliver Puckey is a fourth-year PhD student in Modern European History at the University of Cambridge. His PhD project investigates the Anglo-German cultural relationship during the first half of the nineteenth-century, looking especially at the reception of German music and opera in Victorian Britain. His project situates the movement of German music and musicians to Britain within wider networks of cultural exchange that were developing between Britain and the continent in this period, asking, in turn, how the persistent idea of Germany as the 'land of music' took shape in wider European contexts. In Munich, Oliver will continue to write-up his doctoral research while also conducting preliminary research for a planned postdoctoral project.

The stay is part of the institute’s cooperation with the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies.

Sara-Jane Vigneault is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Prof. Arthur Asseraf. Supported by the Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC and the Cambridge Trust scholarships, her doctoral project analyses intimate contact between French colonised men and European civilians in France and Germany from the First World War until the end of the Second World War. The presence of racialised soldiers on European soil offered unprecedented possibilities to cross the intimate frontiers of the empire. In response, French authorities sought what Vigneault calls ‘containment projects’ through biopolitical governance strategies to control racialised men’s proximity with European women and protect the imperial rule.

The arrival of colonized men and the emergence of new restrictive measures on metropolitan soil provide a microcosm of how social boundaries were conceptualised and disputed in Hexagonal France. But including Germans’ experiences and intimate contact with colonised men in Germany also complicates our understanding of what was considered tolerable and transgressive for French authorities. A transnational approach focusing on the deployment of colonial troops on German territories during the Wars seeks to address how such encounters produced a redefinition of colonial borders in response to which French colonial authorities vacillated between the defence of colonised men on European borders and the maintenance of racial and colonial boundaries on racialised bodies.

Probing the intimacies of the empire through the porous and ambiguous frontiers the wars produced, Vigneault highlights the limits of such ‘containment’ practices found in France and Germany. She maps individual and social bodies as a conceptual space in which bodies encounter, incorporate, and resist dominant discourses and carve a space to voice women’s and soldiers’ experiences and interactions in light of specific constructions of sexuality, race, gender, and class that presupposed white endogamy. She stresses French colonised soldiers’ and European civilians’ agencies and roles – as both agents against and victims of this apparatus. Such an objective repositions them as social actors in the formation of internal and external identification processes in the French Empire and beyond.

The stay is part of the institute’s cooperation with the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies.

Yves Müller ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Landesgeschichte/ Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt in Halle/Saale. Hier ist er mit dem BMBF-geförderten Projekt „Institutioneller Rassismus in den Sicherheitsbehörden der DDR am Beispiel der Bezirke Magdeburg und Halle, 1949 – 1989/90“ (IRiS) befasst. Er hat an der Universität Hamburg zur nationalsozialistischen „Sturmabteilung“ (SA) im Zweiten Weltkrieg promoviert und ist u. a. Mitbegründer des Zeithistorischen Arbeitskreises Extreme Rechte (ZAER). Forschungs- und Arbeitsschwerpunkte umfassen politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik, Männlichkeiten im Nationalsozialismus, extreme Rechte in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Erinnerungskultur und -politik in der DDR und Polizeigeschichte.

Im Rahmen des Leibniz-Fellowships „Value of the Past“ hält sich Yves Müller im April 2024 am Institut für Zeitgeschichte München-Berlin auf. Unter dem Titel „Der Anti-Nazi. Kurt Hirsch (1913–1999) und die Bewältigung der Gegenwart“ wird er einen Beitrag zur deutschen Zeitgeschichte leisten. Thematisch bewegt sich das avisierte Projekt im Grenzbereich zwischen der Nachgeschichte des Holocaust und der Geschichte von Holocaust Survivors sowie als Vorgeschichte der Gegenwart im Bereich der bundesrepublikanischen Zeit- und Demokratiegeschichte. Darüber hinaus bieten sich auch Anknüpfungspunkte in der zeithistorischen Rechtsextremismusforschung sowie der Kommunismusforschung.

Weitere Informationen: https://archlsa.de/iris.html & https://www.geschichte.uni-hamburg.de/forschung/doktoranden/mueller-yves.html

Kontakt: ymueller[at]lda.stk. sachsen-anhalt.de