Professor Alan Kramer

Professor of European History

Research Interests

In recent years my research has been devoted to Europe in the era of the First World War, focusing on the analysis of violence, the relationship between armed forces and non-combatants, war crimes, and prisoners of war, mainly in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. I have attempted to synthesize cultural history with military, political, social, and economic history, and place the First World War in a longer-term context reaching to the Second World War. Current projects include the International History of Concentration Camps; 1914-1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of World War I (with O. Janz, Berlin, and partners in 12 countries); economic warfare and blockades in the First World War.

Select Publications
Books

• Dynamic of Destruction. Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; paperback 2008, pp. 434.
• German Atrocities, 1914. A History of Denial, London and New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001 (with John Horne), pp. 608 + xv. (German translation, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2004. French translation, Paris: Editions Tallandier, 2005.)

Articles

• (Forthcoming August 2011): an editorial will appear in no. 4/2011 of the journal Mittelweg 36 which will be devoted to the topic ‘The World of the Camps’, with five essays by participants at the conference I co-organized in Berlin in April 2011.
• ‘Mass Killing and Genocide from 1914 to 1945: Attempting a Comparative Analysis’ in Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (eds.), Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination. Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies, London and New York, Continuum, 2010, pp. 213-232.
• ‘Ethnische Säuberungen vom Ersten Weltkrieg zum Nationalsozialismus’, in Gerd Krumeich (ed.), Nationalsozialismus und Erster Weltkrieg, Essen: Klartext, 2010, pp. 323-345.
• ‘Combatants and Noncombatants: Atrocities, Massacres, and War Crimes’ in John Horne (ed.), A Companion to the First World War, Oxford, Chichester, and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell-Wiley, 2010, pp. 188-201.
• ‘The First World War as cultural trauma’, in Richard J.B. Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 32-51.
• ‘The First World War and German Memory’ in Heather Jones, Jennifer O’Brien, and Christoph Schmidt-Supprian (eds.), Untold War. New Perspectives in First World War Studies, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008, pp. 385-415.
• ‘Italienische Kriegsgefangene im Ersten Weltkrieg’, in Hermann J.W. Kuprian and Oswald Überegger (eds.), Der Erste Weltkrieg im Alpenraum. Erfahrung, Deutung, Erinnerung. La Grande Guerre nell'arco alpino. Esperienze e memoria, Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag, 2006, pp. 247-258.

Teaching and Supervision

My undergraduate teaching ranges through the history of continental Europe since 1870. At level 2 (Senior Freshman) I teach ‘Continental Europe: Grandeur and Decline, 1870-1920s’, and ‘Cataclysm and Rebirth: History of Continental Europe 1914 to the Present’. My current sophister special subjects (levels 3 and 4) are List I: ‘The Weimar Republic. Culture, politics, and society in Germany, 1918 to 1933’; List III: ‘The First World War in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy’. I contribute to the level 1 (Junior Freshman) course ‘Interpreting History’, to the European Studies level 4 (Senior Sophister) course ‘Modernism and Mass Society’ with a unit on Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and to the M. Phil. in Public History. I have supervised several PhD theses on Europe in the era of the First World War, and I am currently supervising theses on both world wars. I welcome graduate students interested in working on German history in the first half of the 20th century, and more broadly Europe (including also Italy, Austria, France, and Belgium) in the era of the two world wars.

Professor Kramer on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Room
Department of History
Trinity College
Dublin 2.

Telephone: +353 1 896 1411
Fax: +353 1 896 3995
Email: alkramer@tcd.ie