The Gerald D. and Norma Feldman Annual Lecture

Established to honor the life and work of former IES Director, Gerald Feldman, the Gerald D. and Norma Feldman Annual Lecture brings eminent scholars to UC Berkeley to share their work in German and European Studies.

Gerald D. Feldman (1937 - 2007) was Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. An internationally known and influential political historian of twentieth-century Germany, Feldman published more than 27 books and over 100 scholarly articles. He also served on the editorial board of the journal Contemporary European History for over 15 years. Throughout his career he received several prizes and honors, including the prestigious Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2000). In 2004 he was elected to the exclusive Bavarian Academy of Sciences. Professor Feldman was renowned for his passion for teaching and devotion to his students. At Berkeley he fostered the growth of the Center for German and European Studies, which became today's Institute of European Studies. The Gerald D. and Norma Feldman Annual Lecture honors his legacy.

Past Lectures

Jeroen Dewulf, Isabella Tomas, Paul Lerner, and Viola Alianov-Rautenberg pose in front of a picture of Gerald Feldman

Radio, Propaganda, Terror: Austrian-Jewish Refugees and the Media

Paul Lerner | November 13, 2024

Drawing from his larger research project on how Central European émigrés reimagined American life in the wake of fascism, Paul Lerner examines radio as a site of intervention for émigré psychologists, psychoanalysts, and social scientists. He highlights Viennese émigré Herta Herzog and her research on responses to Orson Welles’s 1938 Martian invasion broadcast, situating her within a tradition of thought on media, terror, and violence among German-speaking, particularly Austrian Jewish, émigrés in the U.S. This cohort, having witnessed the terrifying use of radio for Nazi propaganda, remained especially attuned to the incitement of terror through mass media.

German Memory Culture at a Crossroad?

A. Dirk Moses | November 3, 2023

Long considered as a settled and exemplary case of “coming to terms with the past,” German memory culture stands at a crossroad. Serial controversies have dotted the public sphere in recent years, ranging from so-called “postcolonial” contextualization of the Holocaust in global history to the conservative indulgence of far-right resentments about Holocaust memory. Now, suddenly, this secure memory culture seems brittle and fragile as Germany’s political class feels besieged by a diversifying population and an insurgent Alternative für Deutschland party. Tracing contrapuntal demographic and political trends over the past twenty years reveals dilemmas and divisions rather than settled answers to the challenge of remembering the Nazi past in a fracturing society.

Masculinity and Imperial Representation in the Later Roman Empire

Susanna Elm | November 10, 2022

The Roman emperor Constantine the Great is usually considered the first Christian Roman emperor. It is certainly true that Constantine made Christianity a legal Roman religion, but the emperor who really laid the foundation for divinely authorized Christian rulership was the emperor Theodosius “the Great” some sixty years later. Theodosius, like Constantine and most Roman emperors before him, was considered sacred and divine. As divine ruler he embodied and represented the apex of virtue, of everything Romans considered essential in a man and leader - virtue in fact derives from the Latin word vir, meaning elite male. How then did Theodosius transform Roman imperial rule into a Christian ideal? How did he conceive of himself as the most sacred and divine yet Christian vir and emperor? How did he make his vision of divine Christian Roman sovereignty visible? The Christian orator Pacatus’s praise of Theodosius’s victory in a civil war offers essential insights into the signal transformation of the divine Roman emperor into the Christian sovereign the emperor initiated and that was to last for centuries to come.

Poster of 2019 Feldman Lecture

Christopher Clark (University of Cambridge), "The Times of Power" (2019)

Poster of 2018 Feldman Lecture

Yuri Slezkine (Professor of History, UC Berkeley), "The Life and Death of the Russian Revolution" (2018)

Poster of 2017 Feldman Lecture

Margaret Lavinia Anderson (UC Berkeley), "The Ambassador's Story: Henry Morgenthau, the Armenian Genocide, and the Problem of Humanitarian Intervention" (2017)

Poster of 2016 Feldman Lecture

Celia Applegate (Vanderbilt University), "Music and Work Before the Great War in Germany" (2016)

Feldman Lecture speakers

From left: IES Director Jeroen Dewulf, speaker Roger Chickering and Mrs. Norma Feldman; Professor Yuri Slezkine addresses the audience at the Bancroft Hotel

Jonathan Zatlin Feldman Lecture

Jonathan Zatlin (Boston University), "The Ruse of Retirement: Eichmann, Theresienstadt, and the Elderly" (2015)

Poster of 2014 Feldman Lecture

Roger Chickering (Georgetown University), "Imperial Germany's Peculiar War, 1914-1918" (2014)

Poster of 2013 Feldman Lecture

John Connelly (UC Berkeley), "Christian Eschatology and the Nazi Final Solution" (2013)

Poster of 2012 Feldman Lecture

James Sheehan (Stanford University), "The Origins of the Legible State: Mapmaking, Census Taking and Codification in Early Modern Europe" (2012)