Maiken Umbach

Professor of Modern History and Faculty Research Director, University of Nottingham
AREAS OF EXPERTISE:

History of the Third Reich, especially propaganda, visual culture, architecture, photography.

Regionalism in modern Europe. The historical roots of modern identity politics; the role of material culture (buildings, urban design, objects) in shaping national and local identity; the history of the brand "Made in Germany".

The role of private 'snapshot' photography in prompting political behaviour, how people internalise, or contest, ideologies and cultural beliefs.

The problems of using 'perpetrator photography' to represent difficult histories, especially in the context of the way we document and exhibit the Holocaust.

Landscape: ways of seeing and perceiving landscapes, the way that historically created landscape shape our ideas of what is 'natural' and 'beautiful'. Modern landscape art; Anselm Kiefer.

Brief bio:

1970
born in Germany
1989-92
University of Cambridge MA in History, First Class
92-96
University of Cambridge PhD (study of how landscape gardens in England and Germany shaped and expressed ideas about Enlightenment and progress, and travelled across national boundaries)
95-98
Junior Research Fellow, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
98-2011
Senior Lecturer in Modern European History, University of Manchester
2011-present
Professor, Chair in Modern History, University of Nottingham

Visiting appointments
Institute for Contemporary History, Munich (2015)
Freie Universität Berlin (2008)
University College London (2005-06)
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (2004-05)
Harvard University (2001-02 and 2003)
Australian National University (2001)

Key books / publications (highlights only):

Photography and Twentieth-Century German History, Central European History. 48(3), 2015

German Cities and the Genesis of Modernism, 1890-1930, Oxford University Press, 2009

Municipalism, Regionalism, Nationalism. Hybrid Identity Formations and the Making of Modern Europe. European Review of History, 15/3 (2008)

Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment. Stanford University Press, 2005

Hijacked Heimats. National Appropriations of Local and Regional Identities in Germany and Spain, 1930-1945, with Xosé M. Núñez Seixas, European Review of History 15/3 (2008), 295-316.

A Tale of Second Cities: Autonomy, Culture and the Law in Hamburg and Barcelona in the Long Nineteenth Century, American Historical Review, 110/3 (2005), 659-692.

Memory and Historicism: Reading between the Lines of the Built Environment, c.1900, Representations, 88 (2004), 26-54.

"Made in Germany". In H Schulze and E Francois, Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. Beck, 2001.

Federalism and Enlightenment in Germany, 1740-1806, Hambledon, 2000.

FOR MORE DETAILS, SEE:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/history/people/Maiken.Umbach