Assistant Professor of History, Yale University
Berthold Leibinger Fellow - Class of Spring 2019
Jennifer Allen is an assistant professor of history at Yale University. She received a BA in political and social thought from the University of Virginia, and an MA and PhD in history from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work has been funded by the Center for Holocaust Studies at the Institute for Contemporary History, in Munich; the German Academic Exchange Service; the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies at the University of California, San Diego, with support from the Thyssen Foundation; the MacMillan Center and Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University; and the Institutes for European Studies and International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. A specialist on modern Germany, with a particular interest in late twentieth-century cultural practices, Allen has also traced how Germany’s recent grassroots commemorative practices became a model for international communities as diverse as those in Moscow and Buenos Aires, as citizens around the world have worked to create decentralized public monuments to the victims of mass atrocities.
Academy Activities
16
May
19
Berthold Leibinger Lecture
Insurance against Total Destruction: East and West German Plans to Save Civilization
Jennifer Allen discusses how both sides of the Iron Curtain planned to save civilization as the Cold War heated up.
24
Apr
19
Fellow Spotlight: Jennifer Allen
Jennifer Allen is an assistant professor of history at Yale University. In her Academy project, a transnational study of postwar efforts in both East and West Germany to “save the world,” Allen explores two connected themes. First, she examines the range of possible global catastrophes that capt ...
16
May
19
Insurance against Total Destruction: East and West German Plans to Save Civilization
As the Cold War intensified, both sides of the Iron Curtain sought new ways to protect themselves against a possible hot war. Europe’s leaders recognized their relative powerlessness against the destructive capacity of nuclear weapons. Their pessimism about the future led them to plan seriously fo ...