Sean Eedy and Jane Freeland, who finished their PhDs under the supervision of Jennifer Evans, have signed contracts to publish their monographs. Eedy’s explores comic book publishing in the German Democratic Republic as both a tool of the state and source of subcultural identity for communist consumers. Comics books, while primarily aimed at children and teens, tackled subjects from the memory of the Holocaust to the growing dissatisfaction with social conditions in the GDR. It will be published by Berghahn Books in 2021. Jane Freeland examines feminist organizing and state response to the problem of domestic violence in late Cold War, divided Germany, where it was ignored by East German authorities as a vestige of capitalism. Although quicker to develop much-need social policies, the Federal Republic often acted without consultation of activists and scholars, and disproportionally targeted migrant groups as especially in need of intervention. Freeland’s study will be published also in 2021 with Oxford University Press.
Both Dr. Eedy and Dr. Freeland teach history at Canadian universities and in the UK. Eedy is a sessional lecturer in the Department of History at Carleton while also teaching at Trent. Freeland is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the German Historical Institute in London UK where she also teaches at Queen Mary University.