| Andrew Demshuk, Ph.D |
 email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it office: HHB 360G Dr. Andrew Demshuk specializes in modern Central European history, with emphasis on the influence of memory and ethnic cleansing in the post-1945 German states and Poland. His monograph, which was published with Cambridge University Press in June 2012, examines how, amid the charged political context of the early Cold War, millions of West Germans expelled from the province of Silesia after World War II came to recognize that physical return was not possible. Further information is available at http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/isbn/item6658413/?site_locale=en_GB Dr. Demshuk's book won one of the two honorable mentions from the biannual 2012 Smith book award from the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association. Dr. Demshuk has published numerous articles in his field area and is preparing for his next major research project: a comparative history of post-1945 reconstruction and urban planning in three cities which had been part of united Germany before 1945 and were then divided by Cold War borders: in West Germany, East Germany, and western Poland. He hopes to examine the politics of memory in urban reconstruction under three contrasting regime ideologies and societies haunted by the recent Nazi past. The UAB College of Arts and Sciences and Faculty Development Grant will be generously supporting a summer of work on this project in 2013. Dr. Demshuk joined the department in fall 2011 after teaching courses on German and Polish history at Aquinas College and the University of Illinois and conducting research at libraries, institutes, and archives across Germany with funding from the Simon Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig (2006), the Herder Institut in Marburg (2007, 2009) and the German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD) (2007-2008). In addition to frequent participation in overseas conferences and workshops, he regularly contributes papers at annual meetings of the German Studies Association (GSA), Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), and Southern Historical Association (SHA). Bicycling, hiking, and international travel are favorite activities for Dr. Demshuk. He has bicycled across the Neckar, Ruhr, Rhine, Danube, and Lahn valleys of Germany and also took on the Swabian and Sauerland hill countries. Hiking adventures have included about 200 km of the Mosel river valley from Schengen (where France, Germany, and Luxembourg meet) to Koblenz at the mouth of the Mosel on the Rhine, the Bóbr river valley and Tatra Mountains in Poland, the Alps on the Austrian-German border, and the German Harz and Schönbuch forests. His travels have taken him to Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Russian Federation, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, France, England, Italy, Finland, and Canada. He comes from Michigan, his German Heimat (home) is Marburg, and his favorite church in the world is the Cologne Cathedral (pictured), the King of Gothic. In the near future, he plans to travel with his wife on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok. Education: Teaching Areas: Courses for Spring 2014 (planned): Courses for Fall 2013: Courses for Spring 2013: Courses for Fall 2012: Courses for Spring 2012: Courses for Fall 2011: Recent Publications: The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). “What Was the ‘Right to the Heimat’? West German Expellees and the Many Meanings of Heimkehr,” Central European History 45, no. 3 (September 2012): 523-556. “Reinscribing Schlesien as Śląsk: Memory and Mythology in a Postwar German-Polish Borderland,” History & Memory 24, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012): 39-86. “‘Heimaturlauber’. Westdeutsche Reiseerlebnisse im polnischen Schlesien vor 1970,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung 60, no. 1 (2011): 79-99. “Heimweh in the Heimat. Homesick Travelers in the Lost German East, 1955-1970,” in Re-mapping Polish-German Historical Memory: Physical, Political, and Literary Spaces since World War II, ed. Justyna Beinek and Piotr H. Kosicki (Bloomington: Slavica, 2011): 57-79. “‘When you come back, the Mountains will surely still be there!’ How Silesian Expellees processed the Loss of their Homeland in the early Postwar Years, 1945‑1949,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung 57, no. 2 (2008), 159-186. “‘Wehmut und Trauer:’ Jewish Travelers in Polish Silesia and the Foreignness of Heimat,” Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts (Dec. 2007): 311-335. “Citizens in Name Only: The National Status of the German Expellees, 1945-1953,” Ethnopolitics 5, no. 4 (Nov. 2006): 383-397. |