Seminar with Stefan Berger: Memorializing an Industrial Past: by whom, for whom and how? The Ruhr area of Germany in Comparative Perspective.

This lecture will focus on the agents/activists who have been promoting the memory of the industrial past, asking what is at stake in their efforts. Starting from what arguably is the world capital of industrial heritage, the Ruhr region of Germany, it will move out to take to account of industrial heritage activism in other parts of the world.

Stefan Berger is Professor of Social History and Director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. He is also executive chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr in Bochum and an Honorary Professor at Cardiff University in the UK. He has recently completed, as PI, a Horizon 2020 Project on ‘Unsettling Remembering and Social Cohesion in Contemporary Europe’ (UNREST, www.unrest.eu , 2016 – 2019). He is publishing, as general editor with Jeff Olick, a six-volume Cultural History of Memory for Bloomsbury. More recently he has published a special issue of ‘Labor: Studies in Working-?Class History’ on ‘De-Industrial Heritage’ – with Steven High as co-editor. His most recent monograph is ‘The Past as History: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Modern Europe’ (with Christoph Conrad, Palgrave MacMillan, 2015). More on academia.edu or on his website: www.isb.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/mitarbeiter/berger/index.html.de

 This seminar is organized in the context of the ERC-funded research project Remembering Activism (ReACT).
Contact: Prof. Dr. Ann Rigney (a.rigney@uu.nl)