Opened Practices Users Named: Sheffer

History Department
450 Serra Mall, Building 200
Stanford University

I received my PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008, and am currently a Mellon Humanities Fellow in the History Department at Stanford University.

I received my PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008, and am currently a Mellon Humanities Fellow in the History Department at Stanford University. My research on the Cold War examines the haphazard construction of the Iron Curtain in Germany by local, state, and international interests from 1945-1989, and ways in which the infamous East-West "wall in the head" was both a product and a producer of the wall on the ground. My doctoral dissertation, "Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain," reveals the startling extent to which borderland residents participated in their own partition, and offers an unconventional perspective on Germany's postwar journey from Nazism to democracy and to communism and its dissolution. During my time at Stanford, I look forward to completing my book manuscript and further exploring the intersection of global events and everyday life. I have woven this emphasis on individual experiences into innovative quarter-long identities projects for courses in the History Department, "Germany and the World Wars, 1870-1990," and "Self-policing, Denunciation, and Surveillance in Modern Europe."