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Research Interests

Modern Central Europe, migrations and ethnic cleansing, memory and nostalgia, post-WWII urban reconstruction, historic preservation, environmental devastation and "recultivation", border claims and regime legitimacy, civic activism, nationalism, borderlands, transnational interchange.

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Selected Publications

Peer-Reviewed Books:

• Three Cities after Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction across Cold War Borders (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). Winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award, Society of Architectural Historians, 2023
• Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany (Cornell University Press, 2020). Honorable Mention, David Barclay Book Prize, German Studies Association
• Demolition on Karl Marx Square:ÌęCultural Barbarism and the People's State in 1968 (Oxford University Press, 2017).
• The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Paperback Edition, 2014. Honorable Mention, Smith Book Award, Southern Historical Association
• Co-Editor and Contributor: “The Voice of the Lost German East: Heimat Bells as Soundscapes of Memory,” in Cultural Landscapes: Transatlantische Perspektiven auf Wirkungen und Auswirkungen deutscher Kultur und Geschichte im östlichen Europa, ed. Andrew Demshuk and Tobias Weger (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2015).

Peer-Reviewed Articles:

• "Erasure as Heritage: Memorial Legacies after Pit Mining across Leipzig's 'Recultivated' Coalfields," in Cultural Landscapes of Energy: Constructing Histories of Power, Prosperity, and Decline, ed. Corinne Geering and Torsten Meyer (forthcoming 2024).
• "The Other Lives of Stasi Spies: Decrypting Informants at the Biographical Level," German Studies Review 47, no. 1 (2024), forthcoming.
• “Forced Migration and Displacement in Postwar East Central Europe,” in International Law and History: Eastern Europe in a Global Perspective. A Handbook, ed. Isabella Löhr, Dietmar MĂŒller, Ned Richardson-Little, and Stefan Troebst (forthcoming 2023).
• “East Germany and the Lost German East: Dresden-WrocƂaw ‘Socialist Friendship’ after Nazism and Forced Migration,” Urban History (forthcoming 2023).
• “Exiling Marx from Karl Marx Square: The Political Lives of a Leipzig Monument before and after 1989,” Journal of Contemporary History (2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/00220094221149971.
• “Building the Cathedral of Democracy: Frankfurt’s Paulskirche in Hitler’s Shadow,” German History 39, no. 4 (Dec. 2021): 602-25.
• “Bach’s Grave as Communist Legacy,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 63, no. 1–2 (June 2021): 119–47.
• “Architecture beyond Ideology: The Politics of Forgotten Landmarks in Communist East Germany,” Journal of Urban History 47, no. 2 (March 2021): 420-449.
• “The People’s Bowling Palace: Building Underground in Late Communist Leipzig,” Contemporary European History 29, no. 3 (August 2020): 339-355.
• “A Polish Approach for German Cities? Cement Old Towns and the Search for Rootedness in Postwar Leipzig and Frankfurt/Main,” European History Quarterly 50, no. 1 (2020): 88-127.
• "Rebuilding after the Reich: Sacred Sites in Frankfurt, Leipzig, and WrocƂaw, 1945-1949," in War and the Urban Context, ed. Tim Keogh (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019).
• “A Mausoleum for Bach? Holy Relics and Urban Planning in Early Communist Leipzig, 1945-1950,” History & Memory 28, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2016): 47-89.
• “Preservationism, Postmodernism, and the Public across the Iron Curtain in Leipzig and Frankfurt/Main, 1968-1988,” in Re-framing Identities: Architecture’s Turn to History, ed. Ákos MoravĂĄnszky and Torsten Lange (Berlin: BirkhĂ€user/De Gruyter, Fall 2016).
• “Godfather Cities: West German Patenschaften and the Lost German East,” German History 32, no. 2 (2014): 224-255.
• “What Was the ‘Right to the Heimat’? West German Expellees and the Many Meanings of Heimkehr,” Central European History 45, no. 3 (September 2012): 523-556.
• “Reinscribing Schlesien as ƚląsk: Memory and Mythology in a Postwar German-Polish Borderland,” History & Memory 24, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012): 39-86.
• “‘Heimaturlauber’. Westdeutsche Reiseerlebnisse im polnischen Schlesien vor 1970,” Zeitschrift fĂŒr Ostmitteleuropaforschung 60, no. 1 (2011): 79-99.
• “Heimweh in the Heimat. Homesick Travelers in the Lost German East, 1955-1970,” in Re-mapping Polish-German Historical Memory: Physical, Political, and Literary Spaces since World War II, ed. Justyna Beinek and Piotr Kosicki (Bloomington: Slavica, 2011): 57-79.
• “‘When you come back, the Mountains will surely still be there!’ How Silesian Expellees processed the Loss of their Homeland in the early Postwar Years, 1945‑1949,” Zeitschrift fĂŒr Ostmitteleuropaforschung 57, no. 2 (2008), 159-186.
• “‘Wehmut und Trauer:’ Jewish Travelers in Polish Silesia and the Foreignness of Heimat,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts (Dec. 2007): 311-335.
• “Citizens in Name Only: The National Status of the German Expellees, 1945-1953,” Ethnopolitics 5, no. 4 (Nov. 2006): 383-397.

Review Essays:

• “Ethnic Cleansing and its Legacies in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe,” European History Quarterly 43:2 (April 2013): 326-334.
• Hans Henning Hahn and Robert Traba, eds., Deutsch-Polnische Erinnerungsorte, 5 vols., ZfO (forthcoming).
• Cornelia Eisler, Verwaltete Erinnerung– symbolische Politik and Stefan Scholz, VertriebenendenkmĂ€ler, ZfO (forthcoming).

Over forty book reviews with American Historical Review, Central European History, Slavic Review, European History Quarterly, German Studies Review, The Polish Review, Slavonic & East European Review, Canadian Journal of History, Zeitschrift fĂŒr Ostmitteleuropaforschung, Sehepunkte, Canadian Slavonic Papers, H-German, H-Soz-Kult, and Pol-Int.