Modern Europeanist Eli Rubin Joins History Department
The Department of History is delighted to announce the appointment of Eli Rubin who will join the faculty in the fall. Mr. Rubin is a specialist in Post World War II Europe and will complete his dissertation at the University of Wisconsin, Madison this summer. His work is entitled “Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic: Towards an Economic, Consumer, Design and Cultural History.” Rubin analyzes the East German Communist Party’s use of plastics to create what he calls a “specifically socialist consumer society.”
During his graduate studies, Mr. Rubin was awarded a Social Science Research Council Fellowship in the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies. He worked at the Free University of Berlin. His research is based on archival sources of the former government of East Germany, as well as sources from material and popular culture.
He is an enthusiastic classroom instructor and will offer undergraduate and graduate courses in European history, emphasizing the twentieth century. His wide-ranging interests will result in courses on modern Eastern Europe, the history of material culture, modern Jewish history, and the Holocaust. He is especially interested in helping students gain a sense of change over time by focusing on everyday life. “The material environment,” he says, “forms a crucial area for understanding the intersection between average people and the broad historical issues that have affected them.”