Dr Alexander Brown BA (Hons.), MRes, PhD
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow Languages, Cultures and Film
- Work email A.D.Brown2@liverpool.ac.uk
About
Personal Statement
Alex joined the University of Liverpool as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in October, 2022. Prior to taking up this post, he worked as a Research Associate on the AHRC-supported project "Knowing the Secret Police: Secrecy and Knowledge in East German Society" at Newcastle University (https://research.ncl.ac.uk/secretsstasi/).
His general research focus is on history and memory of state socialism in East Germany (Soviet Zone of Occupation/German Democratic Republic 1945-1990) with a special interest in the actions of state actors in the processes of remembering, the politics of memory and ideology in post-1990 Germany.
The Leverhulme project: ‘“The Answer to Auschwitz”?: Holocaust Memory and Antifascism in the Other Germany’ looks at how the GDR incorporated Holocaust commemoration into their understanding of antifascism and how this thematic complex has in turn been reconstructed and politicised in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1990.
He completed his AHRC-funded PhD in 2019 at the University of Birmingham on the subject of the GDR’s opposition in German state-mandated memory since unification in 1990. His first post-doctoral position (2019-2022) was at Newcastle University where he was Research Associate on the AHRC project ‘Knowing the Secret Police: Secrecy and Knowledge in East German Society’. This project reversed the usual approach to the GDR’s “Stasi” by asking not what did the secret police know about various strata of society but rather what did East Germans know about the secret police. He worked on the political strand of the project which looked at how antifascist networks interacted with the Ministry for State Security ("Stasi") and how the question of archival access during German division and beyond has been politicised.
He has published on Nietzsche and Lukács reception in East and West, Hanns Eisler, Hans Modrow, Paul Merker and representations of the East German Ministry for State Security. Alex is hoping to publish a monograph entitled “Purging Cosmopolitanism”? Paul Merker and the Politics of Memory in the near future.