Two professors debate continuities in German history tomorrow

European studies Professor Helmut Walser Smith of Vanderbilt University will join University of Toronto history Professor Jim Retallack in a discussion of “Continuities in German History” tomorrow.

The public discussion will take place from 11:30am to 1:30pm at 1152A Vari Hall, Keele campus.

Walser Smith, the Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History and director of the Max Kade Center for European & German Studies, is a historian of modern Germany with particular interests in the history of nation-building and nationalism, religious history and the history of anti-Semitism.

Right: Helmut Walser Smith

He is the author of The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), which received the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and was a Los Angeles Times Non-Fiction Book of the Year. He is also the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Modern German History.

Retallack is a historian of Germany and Europe from the period of 1770 to 1945. His research interests include German regional history, nationalism, anti-Semitism, electoral politics and historiography. 

He is author of The German Right, 1860-1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (University of Toronto Press, 2006), editor of Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830-1933 (University of Michigan Press, 2000) and co-editor of Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860-1930 (University of Toronto Press, 2007). He is the general editor of a new series published by Oxford University Press, Oxford Studies in Modern European History.

For more information, visit the Canadian Centre for German & European Studies website.