People

People Details

  • Belinda Davis
  • Belinda Davis
  • Professor of History
  • Degree: Ph.D., University of Michigan
  • Additional Degree(s): B.A., Wesleyan University
  • Rutgers : At Rutgers Since 1992
  • Specialty: Modern Germany and Europe; Popular Politics; Environment; Women and Gender
  • Office: 107 Van Dyck Hall
  • Phone: 848-932-8342

 

CLICK here for Curriculum Vitae.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Belinda Davis is author or co-editor of five books, including the forthcoming The Inner Life of Politics: Grassroots Activism in West Germany, 1962-1983 (CUP), and some 50 articles and book chapters, on themes including popular politics and social movements; conceptions of democracy and how change takes place; environmental history; gender; history of everyday life; oral history, memory, and emotion; urban history; transnational history; and policing, violence, and terror. She is currently co-editing the collection Voices of the Organized Poor: Learning from the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign’s Everyday Struggles for Survival and Alternative Futures; and writing an environmental history of Europe 1500 to the present for Cambridge University Press. Her graduate students have completed or are completing dissertations on topics ranging from Turkish “guestworkers” in West Germany and “resettlers” in East Germany, to identities in German-Polish and German-Czech borderlands, to sexualities in twentieth-century Germany and Hungary, to Holocaust survivors’ memory and resettlement, to “lived ideologies” (antifascism, socialism) and peace activism in the postwar Germanies and Europe.

FORMER AND CURRENT GRADUATE STUDENTS

COURSES REGULARLY TAUGHT

Undergraduate

  • 510:102 Europe in the Global Age
  • 506:299 History Workshop
  • 510:327 Twentieth-Century Europe
  • 510:363 History of Germany From 1871 to the Present
  • 506:401 History Seminar
  • 501:401/360:401 Idea of Europe

Graduate

  • 510:539 Colloquium in Gender, Politics, and Everyday Life
  • 510:549/550 Research Seminar in Women's & Gender History
  • 510:567 Colloquium in German and European History; European Environmental History
  • 510:599 Readings in Modern Europe
  • 510:615/616 Research Seminar in European History

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

 

Books

  • The Internal Life of Politics: ‘Extraparliamentary’ Politics in West Germany, 1962-1983 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2026)
  • Rethinking Social Movements After ’68: Selves and Solidarities in West Germany and Beyond, ed., with Stephen Milder and Friederike Brühöfener (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2022)
  • Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in the 1960s/70s West Germany and U.S., ed., with W. Mausbach, M. Klimke, and C. MacDougall (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010, 2012)
  • Alltag—Erfahrung—Eigensinn: Historisch-anthropologische Erkundungen, ed., with Thomas Lindenberger and Michael Wildt (Frankfurt a.M./New York: Campus, 2008)
  • Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

Selected Recent Articles and Book Chapters

  • “Women and the Self,” in Mark Donnelly and Sinead McEneaney, eds., Routledge Handbook of Gender and the 1960s (London: Routledge, forthcoming)
  • “On Why Historians Should Not Use ‘The West’,” in Interdisciplinary Review of ValEUs (forthcoming, 2025)
  • “Radical Change Close to Home: Transforming the Self and Relations in West German Alternative Politics,”  in Rethinking Social Movements After ‚68 (NY: Berghahn, 2022), 153-72
  • „Introduction: Rethinking Social Movements,“ with Stephen Milder and Friederike Brühöfener, in ibid
  • “What’s in a Revolution? ’68 and Its Aftermath in West Germany,” in Global 1968: Cultural Revolutions in Europe and Latin America, James McAdams and Anthony P. Monta, eds. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021), 230-57
  • “Disappointment and the Emotion of Historical Law and Change,” in Bernhard Gotto and Anna Ullrich, eds., Hoffnung – Scheitern – Weiterleben (Oldenburg: DeGruyter, 2021), 89-105
  • “Redefining the Political: The Gender of Activism in Grassroots Movements of the 1960s-1980s,” in Donna Harsch, et al, eds., Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements  (NY: Berghahn, 2019)
  • “’Going All the Way’ for the People? Traugott v. Jagow’s Changes in Thought and Action Concerning Governance in World War I Germany,” in Intellectuals and the First World War: a Central European Perspective, Tomasz Pudlocki, ed. (Krakow: Jagellionian University Press, 2019)
  • “Europe is a Peaceful Woman, America is a War-Mongering Man? The 1980s Peace Movement in NATO-Allied Europe,” in Maria Bühner and Maren Möhring, eds., Europäische Geschlechtergeschichte in Quellen und Essays (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 2018), reprinted and slightly revised from „Europa ist eine Frau,“ Themenportal Europäische Geschichte

SELECTED RECENT PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITY

  • Rutgers Consortium Co-Representative, Jean Monnet ValEUs International European Studies Award, 2024-2026
  • Chair, Academic Advisory Board of the Rutgers Oral History Archive, 2022-
  • Director, Rutgers Center for European Studies, 2018-2021; 2024-2025
  • Member, EDGES (Engaged Digital German Environmental Studies) Consortium
  • Committee Member, German Studies Association Best History Book Prize, 2020, 2024; Barclay Book Prize, 2023
  • Organizer, Workshop "Democracy, Corruption, and Fossil Fuels: Azerbaijan, the EU, and the Fight for Transparency," New Brunswick, Oct. 2023
  • Co-Organizer, Conference "The Idea and Futures of Europe," Siena, May 2023
  • Selection Committee Member, U.S. Student National Fulbright Prize, 2023

SELECTED AWARDS

  • Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship, European University Institute (Florence), Spring 2015
  • Residential Fellowship, Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (Potsdam), Summer 2006
  • Research Fellowship, Volkswagen-Stiftung, AY 2005-6
  • Research Fellowship, Shelby Cullom Davis Center, Princeton University, 2003-2004

SELECTED PUBLIC APPEARANCES

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