Contact
Biography
I am a Professor of Modern History, and currently, seconded from the role, work as chief advisor at the National Holocaust Centre and Museum. My work is motivated by a passionate belief in combining cutting-edge historical work with interventions that make 'real life' differences in the world. I was educated at Cambridge (BA 1992, PhD 1996, JRF 1995-98), taught at the University of Manchester from 1998-2011, whilst also holding visiting appointments at various international universities. I joined the University of Nottingham in 2011.
Building on work in recent years on the role of photography, official and private, in Nazi Germany, my team and I are now working on an AHRC-funded project on "Photography as Political Practice in National Socialism". Alongside numerous academic publications -- on ordinary German and National Socialism, on Jewish experiences of exclusion and migration, and the role of private photography in both -- we have helped produce a major touring exhibition, "The Eye as Witness; Recording the Holocaust", and a Massive Online Open Course Photographing the Holocaust. I also work with other museums, including the Imperial War Museum London and USHMM, regularly appear on radio and television, and collaborate with Israeli Filmmaker Anat Vogmann on a documentary entitled "Nahariya Magica".
Expertise Summary
National Socialism, in particular its emotional and personal history; amateur photography in the Third Reich.
Cultural history of cities and the built environment in Europe, c. 1850-1945.
Cultural history of nature, landscape and gardens, 1750 to the present.
Teaching Summary
I normally teach modules on comparative cultural histories of National Socialism and Fascism, and on the experience of ideology in everyday life. Due to my current secondment to the National… read more
Research Summary
I work on the histories of National Socialism and the Holocaust, especially the role of 'ordinary' people in perpetrator societies, the role of visual culture in the spreading nad 'naturalisation' of… read more
Recent Publications
I joined the University of Nottingham in 2011, taking up the chair in modern history, after 14 years at the University of Manchester, and a previous ten at the University of Cambridge -- where I had moved after attending school in Germany. I also held visiting appointments at Harvard, the Australian National University, Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), the Free University of Berlin, UCL, and, in 2015, the Institute for Contemporary History at Munich. I work on the relationship between culture, ideas and politics in modern European history, teasing out the ideological meanings of cultural practices, which range from urban planning to private photography, from official architecture to the design of industrial objects, and which I have read as evidence to re-think some big concepts such as Enlightenment, modernism, federalism, regionalism, and National Socialism.
I am passionate about impact and engaging with wider publics. Have a look at the new MOOC I have designed with the British Library here. And if you are interested in the Holocaust and photography, which is my latest project, please have a look at our collaboration with the National Holocaust Centre here.
I normally teach modules on comparative cultural histories of National Socialism and Fascism, and on the experience of ideology in everyday life. Due to my current secondment to the National Holocaust Centre and Museum and being the PI on a large AHRC research project, I will not be offering these modules in the foreseeable future. However, I still contribute lectures and classes to team-taught modules for undergraduates and MA students.
I am very interested in teaching beyond the boundaries of the University. I have designed three free Massive Online Open courses, which you can access here:
Propaganda and Ideology in Everyday Life (with the Biriths Library)
Learning from the Past? A Guide for hte Curious Researcher (with the British Library)
Photographing the Holocaust (with the National Holocaust Museum)
In terms of graduate supervision, three of my doctoral students recently gained their PhDs. Sheona Davies wrote on representations of the Teutonic Knights in popular culture in Weimar and Nazi Germany; she then did a post-doc stint on an AHRC project at Swansea on 'Mapping the War', and is now works for the Commission for Looted Art. Victoria Stiles wrote on representations of British imperialism in German print culture, 1918-1945; she has recently completed an AHRC cultural engagement fellowship, supervised by me and the National Holocaust Centre and Museum. Lucila Mallart wrote on the uses and display of the classical and medieval past in the work of the Catalan politician and architect Puig i Cadafalch, and has just curated an exhibition on this topic in Calatunya. I am currently co-supervising two other students: Ms Seonaid Rogers, on a CDA award with the British Museum, on picture postcards of Israel and Palestine; and Ms Alice Tofts, on a CDA with the Imperial War Museum, on personal photos of people persecuted by the Nazi regime.
I welcome inquiries from all students interested in postgraduate work on any aspect of the cultural history, broadly defined, of modern German or European history, or Europe's relations with the wider world, up to 1945, especially in relation to the use of visual sources including photography, identity politics (such as localism, regionalism, political uses of the past), or new approaches to the study of National Socialism, or the role of ideology in everyday life.
Current Research
I work on the histories of National Socialism and the Holocaust, especially the role of 'ordinary' people in perpetrator societies, the role of visual culture in the spreading nad 'naturalisation' of Nazi ideologies, and on the way these histories shaped Jewish experiences and migrations.
Between 2022-2024, I am seconded to the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, where I work as chief advisor on a large redevelopment project of permanent exhibitions, a programme of temporary exhibitions, digital resources and pedagogic outreach programmes, which seek to establish a clearer connection between Holocaust history and contemporary challenges, especially antisemitism.
My collaboration with the Holocaust Centre dates back to an ongoing project, funded by the AHRC (project grant and two follow-on projects), exploring what photography may tell us about the history of National Socialism and the Holocaust. For details, click here to go to the project page, for more information on outputs and impacts. We have also produced a free online resource that presents our findings in an accessible way.
Generally, my work explores the relationship between politics and visual culture in modern Europe. I look to sources such as the built environment, or the history of private photography, and use methodologies such as the linguistic turn or the idea of material culture as an 'actant', to shed fresh light on some of the big questions that have animated the study of modern Germany, and modern Europe more broadly, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Political problems I seek to elucidate in this way include the role of regional identities in modern states, 'second cities', federalism, trans-national networks and the spatial imaginaries of totalitarian regimes.
Past Research
The sense of self -- as individuals and as members of imagined communities, of class, nation, gender -- is constituted by an imagination, which, my research argues, is structured by material and visual cultures as well as words. All my work to date, covering a range of examples from European history, from the eighteenth century to the Second World War, explores this nexus. Photographs, paintings, designed objects, architectures all provide clues to how historical actors imaged spaces, such as Heimat/homeland, the city, the region, and nation, and imagined time, the past as well as the future. For details on how I argue these elements payed out in different historical episodes, please click ont he links to summaries of key publications below.
Authenticity: The Cultural History of a Political Concept, Palgrave 2018
Heimat, Region and Empire: Spatial Identities under National Socialism, Palgrave, 2012
German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890 - 1929, Oxford University Press, 2009.
Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment Stanford University Press, 2005.
German Federalism: Past, Present, Future Basingstoke, 2002.
Federalism and Enlightenment in Germany, 1740-1806, London and Ohio, 2000.
Future Research
My next monograph will be a study of the role of private photography, especially family photo albums, in Nazi Germany. Through photos, I explore how people assimilate, appropriate and, on occasion, subvert the political culture generated by the state in their own lived experience. The book will form part of the outcomes of a collaborative, AHRC-funded project called Photography as Political Practice in National Socialism (this links to the full project website). The project builds on findings we published in a special issue on Photography and German History (Central European History, 2015), and a project with the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich on "Private Lives in National Socialism", a book with CUP.
Recent publications include my short monograph, with Scott Sulzener, called "Photography, Migration, and Identity: A German-Jewish-American Story", and a article with Alice Tofts "Private Photos and Holocaust Testimony: A Difficult Relationship" (forthcoming with Holocaust Studies), and an article with Jonathan Stafford on "Photographs, Jews, and Nazis: The Politics of a Visual Archive, historically and today" (forthocming in a volume on Jewish Photography ed by Ofer Ashkenazi). Further articles on the use of photos in museums and in pedagogy have been submitted. We have also curated, jointly with the National Holocaust Centre and Museum, a travelling exhibition, which explores the problem of perpetrator and victim photography through historical displays, Virtual Reality, and an art installation: see here for details of "The Eye as Witness".
MAIKEN UMBACH and GARY MILLS, 2023. Teaching with images: Opportunities and pitfalls
for Holocaust education Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. 30(1), 47–65 MAIKEN UMBACH and ELIZABETH HARVEY, 2015. Photography and Twentieth-Century German History Central European History. 48(3), 1-13 UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2010. Moderne zwischen Heimat und Globalisierung. In: AIGNER, ANITA, ed., Vernakulare Moderne: Grenzüberschreitungen in der Architektur um 1900 Transkript Verlag. 231-262
UMBACH, M., 2009. The modernist imagination of place and the politics of regionalism: the case of Puig i Cadafalch and early twentieth century Barcelona. In: LANDY, J. and SALER, M., eds., The re-enchantment of the world: secular magic in a rational age Stanford University Press. 81-101
UMBACH, M., 2009. German cities and bourgeois modernism, 1890-1924 Oxford University Press.
UMBACH, MAIKEN, ed., 2008. Municipalism, Regionalism, Nationalism. Hybrid Identity Formations and the Making of Modern Europe
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2007. The civilising process and the emergence of the bourgeois self: music chambers in Wilhelmine Germany. In: FULBROOK, M, ed., Un-civilising Processes: Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture Rodopi.
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2007. Culture and Buergerlichkeit in eighteenth-century Germany. In: SCOTT, H.; SIMMS, B., ed., Cultures of Power in Europea during the Long Eigtheenth Century Cambridge University Press.
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2006. Regionalism in modern European nation-states. In: HEWITSON, M. and BAYCROFT, T., eds., What is a Nation? Oxford University Press.
UMBACH, MAIKEN and HUPPAUF, BERND, eds., 2005. Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalisation and the Built Environment Stanford University Press.
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2005. Federalism in Europe: History and Future Options. In: DREW, J, ed., Redefining Europe Rodopi.
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2005. A tale of second cities: autonomy, culture and the law in Hamburg and Barcelona in the long nineteenth century American Historical Review. 110(3), 659-692
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2004. Memory and historicism: reading between the lines of the built environment, c.1900 Representations. 88(Fall), 26-54
UMBACH, MAIKEN, ed., 2002. German Federalism: Past, Present, Future Palgrave Macmillan.
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2002. The vernacular international: Heimat, modernism and the global market in early twentieth-century Germany’ National Identities. 4(1),
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2002. Classicism, Enlightenment and the other: thoughts on decoding eighteenth-century visual culture Art History. 25(3),
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 2001. Made in Germany. In: SCHULZE, H and FRANCOIS, E., eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte II. Beck.
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 1999. Reich, Region und Föderalismus als Denkfiguren in der Frühen und der Späten Neuzeit. In: LANGEWIESCHE, D. and SCHMIDT, G., eds., Die Föderative Nation: Deutschlandbilder von der Reformation bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg Oldenbourg.
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 1998. Visual culture, scientific images and German small-state politics in the Enlightenment’ Past & Present. 158,
UMBACH, MAIKEN, 1998. The Politics of Sentimentality and the German Fürstenbund The Historical Journal. 41,
UMBACH, MAIKEN, Federalism and enlightenment in Germany, 1740-1806 London : Hambledon, 2000..