Speakers and Chairs

 

 

Monika Baár is Professor by Special Appointment in Central European Studies in the Institute for History at Leiden University where she leads the European Research Council-funded project Rethinking Disability: the International Year of Disabled Persons (1981) in Historical Perspective. Her current research focuses on the question how and when disability became a global concept and it pays special attention to regional contexts that are typically perceived as (semi)peripheries.

 

Katja Castryck-Naumann is Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO), Leipzig. Her work focusses on transnational actors in international organizations and the global history of East Central Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her latest publications include the edited volume Transregional Connections in the History of East Central Europe (de Gruyter, 2021).

 

Michel Christian is a researcher at the University of Geneva and at the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences. His research focuses on early childhood in Europe in the 20th century with a special interest to infant welfare and educational discourses and practices.

 

Ioana Cîrstocea is a sociologist, researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and member of the Centre européen de sociologie et science politique (CESSP, Paris). Her research focuses on the circulation and institutionalization of knowledge, gender and post-socialism, transnational women's rights activism in (post-)Cold War settings.

 

Christopher Dietrich is Associate Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Fordham University. A graduate of Grinnell College and the University of Texas at Austin, he is the author of Oil Revolution, the editor of the two-volume Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the History of U.S. Foreign Relations, the editor of Diplomacy and Capitalism: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Relations, and co-editor of the Power, Politics, and the World series at Penn Press.

 

Lucile Dreidemy is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Contemporary History of the University of Vienna and since 2014 Associate Professor (maître de conferences) of German Studies at the University Toulouse II. Her current book project deals with the role of NGOs and QUANGOs in Western developement and foreign politics during the Global Cold War.

 

Marek Eby is a PhD Candidate at the Department of History at New York University. His dissertation explores the history of Soviet malaria control programs from the 1920s to 1950s. His broader research interests include transnational medical science, international public health institutions, and socialist state-building in the twentieth century.

 

Matthieu Gillabert is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Fribourg. He has published works on diplomacy and cultural exchanges during the Cold War, as well as on the history of Warsaw. He has also developed several projects on student mobility and movements, particularly in the Eastern bloc, with a social and postcolonial approach.

 

Daniel Gorman is Professor of History at the University of Waterloo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. His recent and forthcoming publications include Uniting Nations: Britons and Internationalism, 1945-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and, co-edited with Martin Gutmann, Before the UN Sustainable Development Goals (OUP, 2022).

 

Barbara Hof is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, where she completed her dissertation in 2021 on the nuclear age's impact on the need for skilled workforces and how these skills were reproduced. Barbara Hof has also published several articles on the history of cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and educational technology.

 

Bogdan C. Iacob is a researcher at the Institute of History in Bucharest (Romanian Academy). His work centres on the study of East-central and South-eastern European experts (e.g., historians or doctors) in global contexts. He has also published on re-visiting the history of '1989' and post-socialist politics. He is co-author of 1989. A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press 2019), and author of "Malariology and Decolonization: Eastern European Experts from the League of Nations to the World Health Organization", Journal of Global History (2022). 

Yi-Tang Lin is a Swiss National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellow at the History Department, University of Geneva and currently a visiting scholar at the Harvard Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Her first book, "Statistics and the Language of Global Health: Institutions and Experts in China, Taiwan, and the World, 1917-1960" is forthcoming in December with the Cambridge University Press.

 

Christian Methfessel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History. His PhD thesis dealt with the media coverage of the imperial expansion in England and Germany. Currently, he is working on annexations and secessions during the Cold War as well as on European reactions to the Yugoslav Wars of the early 1990s.

 

Sarah Nelson is a postdoctoral fellow at Southern Methodist University. She received her PhD in history and comparative media from Vanderbilt University. A historian of US empire and international communications, her work focuses on the contested significance of "information freedom" across the 20th century and the struggle to decolonize global communications.

 

Mikuláš Pešta is Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at Charles University, Prague. In his research, he focuses on Czechoslovak entanglements with the Global South in the fields of education, knowledge transfers, development, or secret services. Currently he works on student internationalism and Prague-based international organizations in the Cold War.

 

Trudy Huskamp Peterson formerly served as Acting Archivist of the U.S. National Archives; she was the first executive director of the Open Society Archives in Budapest; and served as director of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Archives in Geneva.

 

Martin Rempe is a historian of Modern European and Global History at the University of Konstanz and currently fellow at the Research Centre global dis:connect at the LMU Munich. He is author of the book Entwicklung im Konflikt. Die EWG und der Senegal, 1957–1975, which explores the mechanisms and repercussions of European development aid in Senegal in the age of decolonization.

 

Ned Richardson-Little leads the research group "The Other Global Germany: Deviant Globalization and Transnational Criminality in the 20th Century," at the University of Erfurt, supported by the Volkswagen Stiftung's Freigeist program. He completed his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and previously held a post-doc at the University of Exeter. He has published on narcotics trafficking and the GDR in a special issue of the Journal of the History of International Law that he also edited on the role of the Eastern Bloc in post-war international legal systems. His first monograph The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany, was released with Cambridge University Press in 2020.


Elisabeth Roehrlich is a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Vienna's History Department. She is also co-speaker of the University of Vienna's Global History Group. Her monograph Inspectors for Peace: A History of the International Atomic Energy Agency was published with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2022.

 

Lukas Schemper is a historian with a particular interest in humanitarianism, responses to disaster, and international organisations. He is currently a research associate in the project "Archipelagic Imperatives. Shipwreck and Lifesaving in European Societies since 1800" at the Leibniz Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin. He received his PhD from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva in 2017 with a thesis on the history of attempts to govern "natural" disaster through international mechanisms.

 

Marcia C. Schenck is Professor of Global History at the University of Potsdam since January 2020. She is investigating mobilities between Africa and Europe through the lens of memories of labor and education migrants from Angola and Mozambique to the German Democratic Republic and through the refugee policy of the Organization of Africa Unity.

 

Debbie Sharnak is Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at Rowan University. Her work explores U.S. foreign policy, Latin America, human rights, and transitional justice. She has two forthcoming books and previously published in Diplomacy and Statecraft, the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, and several edited volumes.

 

Agnieszka Sobocinska is Reader in International History and Historical Geography and Director of the Menzies Australia Institute at King’s College London. She is a historian of international development, North-South contacts, and Australia-Asia relations. Her books include Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia (UNSW Press, 2014) and Saving the World? Western volunteers and the rise of the Humanitarian-Development Complex (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is currently working on a third book exploring grassroots resistance to foreign aid intervention across the Global South.

 

Liza Soutschek is a member of the DFG research group “Cooperation and Competition in the Sciences” and has just received her PhD from the RWTH Aachen. Her dissertation focuses on the history of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and in particular its East and West German dimension.

 

Henning Türk is a specialist in 20th century international history and is currently working as a visiting professor at the University Bonn. At present he works on a project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), about "The International Organization of National Energy Policy: Great Britain and Western Germany in the International Energy Agency (IEA), 1974-1993".