Laura Shannon Prize Lecture and Award Presentation - Michael Meng

Michael Meng, author of Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland, winner of the 2013 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies, will present the lecture Why Do We Remember? On the Ambiguities of Cosmopolitan Memory in Contemporary Central Europe.

About the author: Michael Meng is Assistant Professor of Modern German History, Clemson University. In 2001, he received his B.A. in history from Boston College (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), and he earned his Ph.D. in history in 2008 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; his dissertation won the Linda Dykstra Distinguished Dissertation Prize in the Humanities and Fine Arts fromUNC-Chapel Hill and the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize from the Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington. Meng has received grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Council on Germany, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fulbright, the German Marshall Fund, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others. He is currently co-editing with Erica Lehrer a volume on Jewish space in post-Communist Poland, working on a new book project, The Frankfurt Judengasse: A Cultural History since 1796, and is writing several essays on immigration debates in postwar Europe, Jewish emotions and travel after the Holocaust, and montage as a narrative device in the discipline of history. He serves on the Graduate and Early Career Committee of the American Historical Association, and he is one of the coordinators of the Urban Studies Network of the German Studies Association.