DAAD Events

CGES is one of ten Centers for German and European Studies in North America that was founded through a generous grant from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). This funding from the German government makes the following events possible.

Upcoming DAAD Event Series:

Divided Germany and Divided Korea as Cold War Borderlands

2019/20 will mark the seventieth anniversary of two key moments in the history of the Cold War: the founding of the two German states in 1949 and the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. Divided Germany and divided Korea, two countries that were split into halves by the descending Iron Curtain, were unique sites to experience the key ideological struggle of the second half of the twentieth century. The divided countries shared the same language, a common history, as well as kinship structures across the divide. Their inner border ran along the fault lines of geopolitics, making them borderlands of the Cold War.

This lecture series, to be held in fall 2019 and spring 2020, will revisit the history of German and Korean division from new comparative and transnational perspectives that transcend the focus on diplomatic history and comparative political systems which has dominated the scholarship on German and Korean division. Drawing on exciting new research from the disciplines of history, political science, sociology, and anthropology, as well as on the rich expertise on German and Korean studies in Georgetown’s BMW Center for German and European Studies and in its Asian Studies Program, the series—consisting of six lectures and one roundtable—will open up new questions about the similarities and differences of the histories of German and Korean division, as well as about interactions between these borderlands of the Cold War.

Cold War Borderlands Lectures (2019-2020):

  • September 19, 2019: Astrid M. Eckert (Emory University), “West Germany and the Iron Curtain”
  • January 28, 2020: Edith Sheffer (University of California, Berkeley), “Making the Iron Curtain in Cold War Germany”
  • April 7, 2020: You Jae Lee (University of Tübingen)
  • April 21, 2020: Ria Chae (University of Pennsylvania)

Prior DAAD Conferences

  • European Collective Memories in an Age of Populism (April 2019)
    European countries have been deeply influenced by collective memory discourses for decades. Laboriously constructed against substantial opposition from many quarters, Holocaust-centered memory had become a supranational European memory regime. Although there are many causes, the rise of right-wing populists in many countries with a nationalistic worldview has accelerated the decline of this memory regime. This conference discussed the political and cultural consequences of these changing memory discourses.
  • Decolonizing the Museum – Transnational Comparisons (November 2018)
    International Conference, Georgetown University and Howard University. Historians, curators, artists, and activists in both the U.S. and Germany are at the center of discussions about dire pasts, the politics of collecting and exhibiting, and the possibility of repair.
  • 1968–The Global and the Local (March 2018)
    This two-day international conference held at Georgetown University in March 2018 used the fiftieth anniversary of “1968” – an international symbolic shorthand that signifies a broader moment of political and cultural upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s – to revisit its global and local meanings.
  • Regulating Knowledge Flows in the Global Age (November 2017)
    This workshop throws new light on how European states and the U.S. regulate the global flow of knowledge in the name of national security and national interest in a competitive world.