Alum Christina Morina ('07 PhD, History) will be a tenured, full professor of contemporary history at the University of Bielefeld, Germany starting this September. Holding the official title of "Professorin fuer Allgemeine Geschichte unter besonderer Beruckstichtigung der Zeitgeschichte," Morina will continue her work on 19th, 20th and 21st century histories from 1800 to the present.
Morina was recently an Assistant Professor at the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam. Previously, she has worked as lecturer at the University of Jena and was a research fellow at the Jena Center 20th Century History. Her 2007 dissertation from UMD was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011 as Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front War in Germany since 1945. In 2017, she published her second monograph (Habilitation) entiteld Die Erfindung des Marxismus. Wie eine Idee die Welt eroberte. In February 2019, she published Zur rechten Zeit: Wider die Rückkehr das Nationalismus (with Norbert Frei, Franka Maubach and Maik Tändler).
Morina's research focuses on major themes in 19th and 20th century German and European history, particularly the history and memory of World War II and the Holocaust, Jewish and bystander diaries; the history of socialism, Marxism and communism; political culture in Germany since 1945, and the history of historiography. She currently teaches German and European history at the University of Amsterdam and organizes the bi-monthly DIA-Graduiertenkolleg on topics of German, Dutch and European contemporary history and politics.
Exploring the history of postwar Zeitgeschichte from an innovative perspective, Morina is also the co-editor of a collected volume on the nexus between biography and historiography amongst historians in divided Germany (Das 20. Jahrhundert erzählen. Zeiterfahrung und Zeiterforschung im geteilten Deutschland (with Franka Maubach). The book is the outcome of the DFG-funded research network, which she co-directed from 2011 to 2014. Currently, Morina is working on a project on bystanders and the Holocaust based on a systematic analysis of diaries. The project emerges from a conference she co-organized in 2015 entitled Probing the Limits of Categorization: The Bystander in Holocaust History, the results of which were also published as a book in 2018 (edited with Krijn Thijs). Most recently, she set out to develop an interdisciplinary, transnational research cooperation on Memory and Populism, focusing especially on the reception and resonance of populist ideas among voters in Germany, Europe and the U.S. Morina's second monograph Die Erfindung des Marxismus will soon be translated into English and published by Oxford University Press.
"Historical scholarship in Bielefeld has a particularly famous and important role in the German historical profession. Professor Morina's appointment is a very significant accomplishment. It reflects the distinction of her scholarship, both here in College Park and in the important research and writing she has done since. Her appointment to this very important position is also a point of pride for our Department and the University," remarks Dr. Jeffrey Herf, Distinguished University Professor in the History Department.
“I am pleased that, after years spent in the U.S. and the Netherlands, I am finally – both in personal and academic terms – returning home. I will be working at one of the finest history departments in Germany with a strong tradition of critical, interdisciplinary and internationally oriented scholarship. To be able to enrich it with my own work is an incredible honor as well as a splendid challenge," says Morina of her appointment.
(Photo credit: Thomas Gebauer)