Maiken Umbach

Biography

I am a Professor of Modern History. For the past three years, I served as Head of the History Department, and I am now Associate Pro Vice Chancellor for Research of the Arts Faculty at Nottingham. I was educated at Cambridge (BA 1992, PhD 1996, JRF 1995-98), taught at the University of Manchester from 1998-2011, whilst also holding visiting appointments at Harvard; the Australian National University; Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona; UCL; and the Free University of Berlin, and finally joined the University of Nottingham in 2011.

Research Interest

My work explores the relationship between politics and visual culture in modern European history. I look to sources such as the built environment, or the history of private photography, and use methodologies such as the linguistic turn or the idea of material culture as an 'actant', to shed fresh light on some of the big questions that have animated the study of modern Germany, and modern Europe more broadly, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Political problems I seek to elucidate in this way include the role of regional identities in modern states, 'second cities', federalism, trans-national networks and the spatial imaginaries of totalitarian regimes. My current research focuses on photography in the 'Third Reich', particularly the mass practice of photography, and what this tells us about how people absorbed, responded to, and recycled official ideology. We have just been awarded £711,000 from the AHRC for a three-year project, which is also supported by our partners, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, about the use of difficult photographs in documenting and commemorating the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust