Maiken Umbach

Contact

• workRoom A9 Lenton Grove
  University Park
  Nottingham
  NG7 2RD
  UK
• work0115 7484106
• Maiken.Umbach@nottingham.ac.uk

Teaching Summary

At level 3, I teach a course entitled "Culture of Power and the Power of Culture in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy". In it, we explore how images, spaces, rituals and everyday culture shape the way… read more

Research Summary

I have recently moved from the University of Manchester to take up a chair here at Nottingham. My work explores cultural approaches to modern German and European political history. This means I look… read more

Recent Publications

• UMBACH, MAIKEN and SZEJNMANN, CHRIS, eds., 2012. Heimat, Region and Empire: Spatial Identities in National Socialist Germany Palgrave. (In Press.)
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2010. Moderne zwischen Heimat und Globalisierung. In: AIGNER, ANITA, ed., Vernakulare Moderne: Grenzüberschreitungen in der Architektur um 1900 Transkript Verlag. 231-262
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2009. The modernist imagination of place and the politics of regionalism: the case of Puig i Cadafalch. In: LANDY, JOSHUA and SALER, M, eds., The Re-Enchantment of the World Stanford University Press.
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2009. German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924 Oxford University Press.

• View all publications

At level 3, I teach a course entitled "Culture of Power and the Power of Culture in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy". In it, we explore how images, spaces, rituals and everyday culture shape the way people's private lives relate to the political regime in which they live. The course introduces students to challenging new methodologies (especially a broadly Foucauldian cultural history) to help them re-think the relationship between culture and politics, and challenge traditional notions that living under a dictatorship is always the opposite of living in a 'free' western society. In addition, I am involved in teaching Learning History, at level 1, and I teach on the modern strand of the MA programme in History.

I am currently principal supervisor to three PhD students: Ms Sheona Davis, who works on representations of the Teutonic Knights in youth culture in Weimar and Nazi Germany; Ms Victoria Stiles, who works on representations of British imperialism in German print culture, 1918-1945; and Ms Lucila Mallart, who works on the uses and display of the classical and medieval past in the work of the Catalan politician and architect Puig i Cadafalch.

I welcome inquiries from all students interested in postgraduate work on any aspect of the cultural history, broadly defined, of modern European history up to 1945, especially in the fields of urban history, landscape history, use of visual courses and photography as a historical source, identity politics (such as localism, regionalism, political uses of the past), new approaches to the study of fascism, or comparative history.

Current Research

I have recently moved from the University of Manchester to take up a chair here at Nottingham. My work explores cultural approaches to modern German and European political history. This means 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 some 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 next book will be De-Centering Dictatorships: The Regional In Hitler's Germany and Franco's Spain, a volume I am co-authoring with Prof Xose Manoel Nunez Seixas (Universitat de Santiago de Compostela), and which is under contract with Oxford University Press for publication in 2013. I am also editing a book jointly with my colleague Prof Chris Szejnmann (University of Loughborough) entitled Heimat, Region and Empire: Spatial Identities in National Socialist Germany, which is forthcoming with Palgrave early in 2012.

My colleague Prof Neil Gregor (University of Southampton) and I jointly edit the journal GERMAN HISTORY, which is published quarterly by OUP (click here), and, acc to Thomson Reuters, currently the tenth most cited historical journal in the world.

Since 2008, I am also director of the Leverhulme international research network Relating Identities: Locality, Region, Nation and Empire in Modern European History. The pages documenting the network's activities are currently migrating from Manchester to Nottingham, and will become available shortly.

I am currently principal supervisor of three fully-funded PhD students: Ms Sheona Davis, who works on representations of the Teutonic Knights in youth culture in Weimar and Nazi Germany; Ms Victoria Stiles, who works on representations of British imperialism in German print culture, 1918-1945; and Ms Lucila Mallart, who works on the uses and display of the classical and medieval past in the work of the Catalan politician and architect Puig i Cadafalch.

Past Research

For my previous research on the cultural history of modern European politics, please click the links below about my major completed projects and book publications:

German Cities and the Genesis of Modernism, 1890-1930, Oxford University Press, 2009.

Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment Stanford University Press, 2005.

German Federalism: Past, Present, Future Basingstoke, 2002.

Federalism and Enlightenment in Germany, 1740-1806, London and Ohio, 2000.

Future Research

a) Research Project on the history of photography in Germany, c. 1920-1945, with particular emphasis on the relationship between private "snapshots" and the role of photography in commercial and political print culture. Details to follow.

b) Research Project on the history of overlapping political scales / spaces of identification. Details to follow

• UMBACH, MAIKEN and SZEJNMANN, CHRIS, eds., 2012. Heimat, Region and Empire: Spatial Identities in National Socialist Germany Palgrave. (In Press.)
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2010. Moderne zwischen Heimat und Globalisierung. In: AIGNER, ANITA, ed., Vernakulare Moderne: Grenzüberschreitungen in der Architektur um 1900 Transkript Verlag. 231-262
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2009. The modernist imagination of place and the politics of regionalism: the case of Puig i Cadafalch. In: LANDY, JOSHUA and SALER, M, eds., The Re-Enchantment of the World Stanford University Press.
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2009. German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924 Oxford University Press.
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, ed., 2008. Municipalism, Regionalism, Nationalism. Hybrid Identity Formations and the Making of Modern Europe
• UMBACH, MAIKEN and NÚÑEZ SEIXAS, XOSÉ M., 2008. Hijacked Heimats: national appropriations of local and regional identities in Germany and Spain, 1930–1945 European Review of History. 15(3),
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2007. The civilising process and the emergence of the bourgeois self: music chambers in Wilhelmine Germany. In: FULBROOK, M, ed., Un-civilising Processes: Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture Rodopi.
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2007. Culture and Buergerlichkeit in eighteenth-century Germany. In: SCOTT, H.; SIMMS, B., ed., Cultures of Power in Europea during the Long Eigtheenth Century Cambridge University Press.
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2006. Regionalism in modern European nation-states. In: HEWITSON, M. and BAYCROFT, T., eds., What is a Nation? Oxford University Press.
• UMBACH, MAIKEN and HUPPAUF, BERND, eds., 2005. Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalisation and the Built Environment Stanford University Press.
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2005. Federalism in Europe: History and Future Options. In: DREW, J, ed., Redefining Europe Rodopi.
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2005. A tale of second cities: autonomy, culture and the law in Hamburg and Barcelona in the long nineteenth century American Historical Review. 110(3), 659-692
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2004. Memory and historicism: reading between the lines of the built environment, c.1900 Representations. 88(Fall), 26-54
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, ed., 2002. German Federalism: Past, Present, Future Palgrave Macmillan.
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2002. The vernacular international: Heimat, modernism and the global market in early twentieth-century Germany’ National Identities. 4(1),
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2002. Classicism, Enlightenment and the other: thoughts on decoding eighteenth-century visual culture Art History. 25(3),
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2001. Made in Germany. In: SCHULZE, H and FRANCOIS, E., eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte II. Beck.
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 1999. Reich, Region und Föderalismus als Denkfiguren in der Frühen und der Späten Neuzeit. In: LANGEWIESCHE, D. and SCHMIDT, G., eds., Die Föderative Nation: Deutschlandbilder von der Reformation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg Oldenbourg.
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 1998. Visual culture, scientific images and German small-state politics in the Enlightenment’ Past & Present. 158,
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, 1998. The Politics of Sentimentality and the German Fürstenbund The Historical Journal. 41,
• UMBACH, MAIKEN, Federalism and enlightenment in Germany, 1740-1806 London : Hambledon, 2000..