Public and Applied History in Germany: Just Another Brick in the Wall of the Academic Ivory Tower?

Jacqueline Nießer is a research fellow at the Leibniz-Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS) in Regensburg, Germany. She graduated in Cultural Studies with a focus on cultural history and literature at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). Her PhD investigated transnational civic memory activism in the post-Yugoslav region using the example of the RECOM Initiative. Jacqueline has co-edited one volume on applied and public history and published several articles on applied history and memory culture. She has conducted comprehensive ethnographic research in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. Since April 2016, Jacqueline Nießer has been coordinating the international research program “COURAGE. Cultural Opposition – Understanding the Cultural Heritage of Dissent in the Former Socialist Countries” at IOS that is funded by Horizon2020 of the European Union. With COURAGE, she has been researching avant-garde theatre during socialist Yugoslavia as niche of freedom and transnational contact zone.

Juliane Tomann has been managing the research area History and the Public Sphere at the Imre Kertész Kolleg (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany) since September 2014. With her background in cultural studies she is interested in how historical knowledge is produced outside of academia and how the intersection of the academic study of history and the public sphere can be analyzed. Her PhD dissertation completed at the Free University Berlin investigated the role and functions of history in a constellation of deindustrialization and structural change since 1989 in the Upper Silesian (post)industrial city of Katowice, Poland. In her recent postdoctoral book project, she focuses on historical reenactments, and examines performative practices and approaches to the past in the USA, Germany, and Poland with a comparative perspective. Furthermore, she is interested in the theory of public and applied history. She is the speaker of a EU-funded project where she explores the possibilities of how public and applied history can be taught on a common basis in different European countries.

Her doctoral thesis was awarded the Scientific Award of the Ambassador of Poland in 2015. She engaged in research for the second book during a fellowship at Princeton University’s history department during the academic year 2016/2017. Currently she serves as an international consulting editor for The Public Historian.