Interview with Joachim von Puttkamer--December 6, 2011

Interview with Joachim von Puttkamer, Professor of East European History at the Friedrich Schiller University and co-director of the Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena, Germany. Interview conducted in Jena, Germany on December 6, 2011.

Professor von Puttkamer is the author of a number of books and articles, including a monograph on schooling in Hungary 1867-1914 (Schulalltag und nationale Integration in Ungarn: Slowaken, Rumänen und Siebenbürger Sachsen in der Auseinandersetzung mit der ungarischen Staatsidee, 1867-1914) published in 2003, and a synthetic overview of East-Central European history and historiography in the 19th and 20th centuries (Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert) in 2010.

Interview Themes

Puttkamer's path to the study of East-Central Europe and his first monograph on the regulation of factories in pre-revolutionary Russia (2:22)

How contemporary politics in Germany have influenced the study of East-Central Europe (11:10)

Strengths and weaknesses of Anglo-American, German, and East-Central European academic cultures and historiographies compared (16:42)

Relationship between those who study Western Europe and those who study East-Central Europe -- is there a "European" historiography? (25:00)

Why aren't East-Central Europeanists writing broader European histories? (32:45)

On the origins and activities of the Imre Kertész Kolleg (38:40)

How Puttkamer views his own role as a historian of this region (47:52)

The most exciting work in the field; opportunities and challenges (56:35)

To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/28222

Interview with Taner Akçam--November 8, 2010

Interview with Taner Akçam, Associate Professor of History at Clark University's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Interview conducted in Ithaca, NY on November 8, 2010.

Professor Akçam is the author of A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility, published by Metropolitan Press in 2006.

Interview Themes

How Akçam came to be a scholar of genocide (00:47)
Why the study of genocide has been so prevalent and controversial in the past 20 years (10:12)

Akçam's arrest and the issues that brought him into politics in the 1970s (16:09)
How Akçam saw the Turkish state in the 1970s (20:48)
Early responses to the work of Akçam on the Armenian issue (26:12)
Retrospective view of the aspirations of the student movement of the 1960s and 1970s in Turkey (30:08)
The next generation of intellectuals in Turkey and elsewhere and their relationship to ideology (34:53)
The impact of the current preoccupation with memory on contemporary politics (42:20)
Dangers of the politics of grievance (48:08)
Akçam's interest in writing about Islam (54:13)
Aspects of Turkish national consciousness that historians should concern themselves with (1:01:28)
To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/21954