Eli Rubin
Eli Rubin
Assistant
Professor Office: 4418 Friedmann Hall |
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Teaching Dr. Rubin teaches upper level undergraduate courses in modern European history, including “ Europe 1919-1945,” “ Europe 1945-Present,” “The Holocaust in History and Memory” and “Material Culture and Technology.” He also teaches introductory, survey undergraduate courses, including “Modern Western World” and “World History Since 1500.” He has also twice served as a faculty facilitator for the First Year Experience program. He is on leave until Fall 2009 to do research in Berlin, Germany, as an Alexander-von-Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow. Research Dr. Rubin is interested in consumption, industrial design, architecture, urban geography, material culture, oral history, the history of technology and science, and the connections between generations, memory objects, and ideological and political legitimacy, and more recently, neuropsychology, information science, and philosophy of mind. He is currently in Berlin on a two-year postdoctoral fellowship (2007-2009) supported by the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, researching is two subsequent projects, "Material Memory: Marzahn, Socialism, and the GDR" and "The Summer of 1945:Picking up the Pieces in Germany." Together with Synthetic Socialism, these two current projects are intended to form a three-book “arc” on material destruction and replacement in postwar Germany, and will help frame a developing “new materialist” history of Germany. Publications Dr. Rubin’s first book, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic will be published in the fall of 2008 with the University of North Carolina Press. He is also convening a major conference on the future of GDR history to be held at Ann Arbor, December 5-7, 2008, entitled "Writing East German History: What Difference Does the Cultural Turn Make?" supported by the History Dept. and College of Arts and Sciences of Western Michigan University, the University of Michigan Departments of History and German, the German Academic Exchange Service and the German Historical Institute. It is foreseen that this conference will result in a publication that he plans to co-edit. Courses HIST 4580 Europe 1919-1945: 3 hours Focal points include the aftermath and political settlement of World War I; the art, architecture, and culture of Europe of the 1920s; the rise of Fascism and economic collapse: the assault on ethnic and religious minorities and on democratic government; background and major events of World War II; the holocaust; and the immediate postwar events. Readings include Neighbors by Jan Gross; Fascism, about the massacre of the Jews of a local Polish town by their own Polish neighbors; Strange Defeat, a first hand account by a famous French and Jewish historian and officer, Marc Bloch, concerning the rapid French defeat in WWI and Art Spiegelman, Maus I&II, a graphic novel recounting the story of the author's father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew who managed to survive Auschwitz. HIST 4600 Europe 1945-Present 3 hours Major political, economic, social and cultural trends of postwar Europe. Focal points include the creation of the European Union; the establishment of communism in Eastern Europe; the upheavals of 1953 in East Germany, 1956 in Hungary, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, France and West Germany; the emergence of postmodernism in philosophy, art, architecture and culture; the significance of the consumer society in both capitalism and communism; the influx of Muslim immigrants into Europe and the history of terrorism in Europe. Readings include A Woman in Berlin, an anonymous diary of a woman forced endured unspeakable things in her attempt to survive the downfall of Berlin and its occupation by Soviet troops; Sex After Fascism, a brilliant new study by cultural historian Dagmar Herzog, about the strange history of sexuality morality in the two postwar Germanies; and The Wall Jumper, a collection of bitingly funny and bittersweet true stories by Berlin author Peter Schneider about the absurdity of living in the shadow of the Berlin Wall for decades. HIST 4680 The Holocaust in History and Memory 3 hours Course is divided into the actual history of the holocaust, and the issues of its interpretation and commemoration in the postwar era. Focal points include: the origins of biological racism and exterminationist anti-Semitism; the development and structure of Nazism and Hitler’s own ideas; the development of racist and anti-Semitic policies in the Third Reich and the opinion of the German population; the stages of genocide, including the initial concentration camps and euthanasia programs to the mobile killing units on the eastern front to the death camps in Poland; the structure and history of life in the death camps; the controversies over guilt and remembering in Germany; the history and structure of holocaust museums and memorials; the debates over truth, morality and art stemming from the holocaust. Class involves a full-day field trip to the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, outside of Detroit, for a tour, a meeting with a holocaust survivor, and research in the holocaust archives. Readings include The Holocaust by Leni Yahill, The Texture of Memory by James Young, The Holocaust in American Life by Peter Novick as well as numerous primary documents and primary sources such as survivor and perpetrator testimony. HIST 4000 Material Culture and Technology: 3 hours This course looks at the importance of objects, especially certain kinds of technologies, from the Sears catalogue of the 1800s to modern plastics, as a common theme of trans-Atlantic history from the beginnings of the industrial revolution to the post-industrial consumer society. Technology, design, architecture, material culture, gender, economics, fascism, communism, capitalism, and more are the underlying themes of this course. Readings include Victoria deGrazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things; Ruth Schwarz Cowan's classic More Work for Mother; and Jeffrey Meikle's American Plastic: A Cultural History as well as individual articles by authors such as Bruno Latour ("The Berlin Key"); Langdon Winner ("Do Artefacts Have Politics?"); Walter Benjamin (excerpts from The Arcades Project); and Benjamin Barber (Jihad vs. McWorld.) Special emphasis is given to hands-on projects in this course, and all students are asked to make a presentation concerning a technology, an object, or a place of their choosing at the end of the semester. HIST 101 Modern Western World: 3 hours Survey course designed to introduce students to the basic narratives, debates, and analytic skills integral to the history of Europe and the Atlantic world since 1500. Course focuses on three goals: 1) building knowledge base of empirical facts; 2) understanding broad themes and debates in the historiography of this time period; 3) learning skills crucial not only to history but to other disciplines and to life in general, such as how to argue persuasively, how to cite evidence, and how to do research. Reading: The Making of Modern Europe (Bedford Freeman). HIST 3030 The World Since 1500: 3 hours Survey course designed to introduce students to the basic narratives, debates, and analytic skills integral to the history of the world since 1500. Course focuses on three goals: 1) building knowledge base of empirical facts; 2) understanding broad themes and debates in the historiography of this time period; 3) learning skills crucial not only to history but to other disciplines and to life in general, such as how to argue persuasively, how to cite evidence, and how to do research. Special emphasis placed on cross-cultural interaction, voluntary and involuntary migrations, trade, disease and empires. Reading: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel. |
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