Most people who know me will tell you that I enjoy fewer things more than foraging in archives. I have been an archive rat since my days as a researcher on a national historical commission. My love of unusual nuggets (an asbestos sample), dust-encrusted fingers, and the tangible vestiges of previous researchers (documents bedecked in cigarette burns), is even becoming a monograph about one archive and its uses and abuses in the post-World War II era.
Continue reading The Spaces Between: Interstitial Archives and Childbirth Activism in 1970s West Germany and the United StatesTag: modern history
Historiography in Emigration: German Historians in Great Britain after 1933
It is doubly fitting that my book on German-speaking historians who emigrated to Britain after 1933 has now been published in the GHIL’s book series. As the holder of a GHIL scholarship, I had the pleasure to be based at the Institute during two archival research trips to London, and since the majority of sources for my project are in British archives, the chance to visit Britain and consult materials in person was indispensable. The GHIL also provided a highly stimulating intellectual environment, especially when I spoke about my Ph.D. project at the Institute‘s colloquium, which strongly shaped the ultimate direction of my research.
Continue reading Historiography in Emigration: German Historians in Great Britain after 1933Knowledge Trouble – Practice, Theory and Anxiety in late 1970s Feminist Movements
The British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of the late 1970s was marked by intense anxiety and discussion about the status of ‘theory’. At their last national conference held in Birmingham in 1978, the WLM buckled under the weight of a decade of collectively generated, epistemic and ideological complexity, cut across by social divisions of race, sexuality and class. In the aftermath, a radical feminist day workshop was held at the White Lion Free School, London, in April 1979, partly ‘out of a sense of desperation at feeling that none of the most evident and vocal factions at the plenary represented the politics of very many women in Women’s Liberation.’1 The meeting was also an occasion to unpick the movement’s ideological and, increasingly theoretical, density.
Continue reading Knowledge Trouble – Practice, Theory and Anxiety in late 1970s Feminist Movements- ‘We are the Feminists that Women Have Warned Us About:* Introductory Paper’, in Feminist Practice: Notes from the Tenth Year! (Theoretically Speaking) (London, 1979), 1–4, at 1. [↩]
