Please send a two page description of your project, one letter of recommendation (emailed separately by your recommender), and a one-page C.V. to juedische.geschichte@lrz.uni-muenchen.de by Dec. 15, 2011

This workshop for postdoctoral and advanced PhD students will invite 12-15 participants to discuss work related to their current research projects. Papers focusing on German-speaking central Europe with a transnational or comparative perspective are particularly encouraged. Essays or chapters will be due on February 22 so that participants will have an opportunity to read and comment on each other's work. The workshop sessions will take place at New York University's Skirball Dept. of Hebrew and Judaic Studies with joint sponsorship bythe German Historical Institute, Washington, the Canada Research Chair in German and European Studies, Université de Montréal, and the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo Baeck Instituts. Conference convenors: Profs. Michael Brenner, Marion Kaplan, and Till van Rahden.

Potential topics for national, transnational or comparative contributions include debates on Jewish emancipation between the late eighteenth century and the 1870s, the revolutions of 1848, the growth and self-understanding of the Jewish bourgeoisie, the place of Jews in the making of civil society, the paradoxes of liberal democracy and the tensions between unity and diversity in the modern nation-state, Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, Jewish “politics,” the varieties of Jewish religious and secular expression, Jewish responses to the rise of antisemitism and /völkisch/ nationalism, Jewish strategies during the Holocaust, and Jewish experiences and discourses of estrangement and belonging after the Holocaust. The conference also hopes to address issues of gender, class and region as well as lesser-known areas such as the debates about domestic and militaristic conceptions of masculinity. In addition, contributions will be welcome on the prominent role of Jews in local communal organizations, civil society, and more traditional politics and the myriad forms of “unsocial sociability” in German-speaking central Europe. Finally, we also invite contributions on how the memory of the German-Jewish experience shapes and informs postwar European controversies over diversity and difference. The conference is not limited to those territories that became the German nation-state in 1871 but extends to German-speaking regions and cities of the multi-national Habsburg Empire and welcomes comparisons to non-German speaking areas as well.

Thursday 9 AM – 6 PM; Friday 8:30 AM – 3:30 PM