Event

Reception to follow.

Anne Berg studies the histories of waste and recycling, film and cities, racism and genocide. Trained as a historian of modern Germany and Europe, Anne increasingly ventures into more global terrain. Her research proceeds along a number of parallel tracks, connected by a sustained interest in the visual, the spatial and the material. Her first book, On Screen and Off: Cinema and the Making of Nazi Hamburg (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) examines the processes by which local actors from welfare workers, cultural experts, to administrators transformed Hamburg into a Nazi city. Currently, she is working on a book project that examines the disturbing connections between waste management and genocide in the Third Reich, entitled Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany.

Warren Breckman is the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History, with a focus on modern European intellectual and cultural history at the University of Pennsylvania.  His books include Karl Marx, the Young Hegelians, and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the Self (1999), European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents (2007); Adventures of the Symbolic: Postmarxism and Radical Democracy (2013). He is also the editor, with Peter E. Gordon, of the two volume The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought (2019). His currently projects include: a study tentatively titled The Machiavellian Moment in Modern Thought, and a micro-history of World War One based on the diaries of a Canadian cavalryman.