What Do Germans Talk About When They Talk About Genocide?

In this lecture, Wayne State University's Andrew I. Port presents his current project – “What Germans Talk About When They Talk About Genocide” – which looks at German reactions to genocide in other parts of the world after the Holocaust, with a special focus on Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia.

Port grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and now lives in Ann Arbor. Before coming to Wayne State, he taught as a Lecturer at Harvard University and Yale University, and also worked as a Project Coordinator at the Office of Human Rights in Nuremberg, Germany. He was the recipient in 2013 of the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, awarded annually by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where he is now a non-resident Fellow. He spent the first half of 2016 in Freiburg, Germany, as a Marie Curie FCFP Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS), which is modeled after the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

Port is the Editor of the journal Central European History, and previously served as the Review Editor of the German Studies Review. His first book, Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic, appeared in German translation as Die Rätselhafte Stabilität der DDR and received a great deal of media attention in Germany. This included reviews and interviews in leading German news outlets, such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung am Sonntag, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Deutschland Radio, and Deutschland Kultur.

Port’s research focuses on modern Germany and Europe, communism and state socialism, labour history, social protest, popular resistance under autocratic regimes, and comparative genocide. He has been frequently invited to lecture across the United States, as well as in Germany, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in Europe.