James Casteel

James Casteel is a historian of modern and contemporary Europe and is cross-appointed between the Institute of European, Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Bachelor of Global and International Studies in Kroeger College. He currently serves as Program Director for Migration and Diaspora Studies.

Professor Casteel holds a B.A. in German and Philosophy from Tulane University (1994), an M.A. in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago (1997) and a Ph.D. in modern European history from Rutgers University (2005).  He spent significant time studying in Germany at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, the Universität Hamburg, and the Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz.  He has held fellowships and grants from Fulbright, the Rutgers Centre for Historical Analysis, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). He has been a visiting scholar at the Institute for East European Studies at the Free University of Berlin and the Selma Stern Centre for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg.

Research Interests Relates to European, Russian and Eurasian Studies:

Professor Casteel’s research interests include transnational relations between Germany and Russia from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries, nations and empires in central and eastern Europe, diasporic cultures and belonging, European Jewish history including the Holocaust, and transnational and global approaches to the European past.

Current Research Projects:

Areas of Current Teaching

Selected Publication relating to European, Russian and Eurasian Studies:

Books:

• Russia in the German Global Imaginary: Imperial Visions and Utopian Desires, 1905-1941 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016)
• Short-Listed for Council for European Studies Book Award 2018

Journal articles and book chapters:

• “Transcultural Memories among Russian German and Russian Jewish Migrants in Germany: Literature, Museums, and Narrations of the Soviet Past.” In: Jenseits der “Volksgruppe.” Neue Perspektiven auf die Russlanddeutschen zwischen Russland, Deutschland und Amerika, edited by Victor Dönninghaus, Jannis Panagiotidis, & Hans-Christian Petersen, 179-204. Oldenbourg: DeGruyter, 2018.
• “Searching for the ‘New World,’ Finding ‘Asia’: The Rhetoric of Colonization in Interwar German Travellers’ Accounts of the Soviet Union,” Cultural and Social History 11, no. 2 (Spring 2015), 255-272.
• “The Romance of Siberian Captivity: German POWs of the First World War in Friede H. Kraze’s Interwar Novel The Magical Forests,” First World War Studies 5, no. 3 (2014), 287-304.
• “On the Civilizing Mission of the Global Economy: German Observers of the Colonization and Development of Siberia, 1900-1918,” The Nation State & Beyond: Governing Globalization Processes in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century, ed. Roland Wenzelhuemer and Isabel Loehr, Transcultural Research. Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context (Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 2013), 209-233.
• “Historicizing the Nation: Transnational Approaches to the Recent European Past,” Transnational Europe: Problems, Paradox, Limits, ed. Achim Hurrelmann and Joan DeBardeleben (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,  2011), 153-169.
• “The Politics of Diaspora: Russian German Émigré Activists in Interwar Germany,” in Mathias Schulze, et. al., eds. German Diasporic  Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), 117-130
• “The Russian Germans in the Interwar German National Imaginary,” Central European History, 40, no. 3 (2007), 429-466.

Recent Papers Presented (selected):

• “Migrants and Memory Politics: Russian-German and Russian-Jewish Commemorative Narratives and Responses to Refugees in Contemporary Germany,” German Studies Association, Pittsburgh, PA, September 27-30, 2018.
• “Post-Soviet Migrants, Memory Politics, and Responses to Refugees in Germany,” 23rd Annual Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities, Columbia University, New York, NY, May 3-5, 2018.
• “Transcultural Memories and Diasporic Identities among Russian German and Jewish Migrants from the former Soviet Union to Germany,” for international conference “Russian Germans in a Comparative Context: New Research Perspectives,” Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans from Eastern Europe, Berlin, Germany, November 18-19, 2015.
• “Remembering the Soviet Union: Jewish and German Post-Soviet Migrants to Germany,” Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, San Antonio, Texas, November 20-23, 2014.
• “Post-Soviet Migration and Changing Memory Regimes in Germany: Narratives of Soviet Times among Jewish Quota Refugees and ethnic German Aussiedler,” for international conference Post-Soviet Diasporas: Identity Construction, Linkages and Transformation, Carleton University, March 20-21, 2014
• ”Siberia: the Far Eastern Front of Germany’s Imperial Imaginary” for seminar “Not So Quiet on the Eastern Front: New Directions in World War I Studies,” German Studies Association, Denver, Colorado, October 3-6, 2013.
• “Colonizing the Wilderness: Siberia in Interwar German Captivity Narratives” part of panel “Between Germany and Russia: History, Music, Literature, and the Construction of Cultural Myth in the Early Twentieth Century,” German Studies Association, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, October 4-7, 2012.

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