We are delighted to welcome Dr Alexander Brown to the LBI London as our new Postdoctoral Researcher. Dr Brown joins us for a one-year position, bringing outstanding expertise in the history and memory of state socialism in East Germany.
Currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Liverpool, Dr Brown’s research investigates how the German Democratic Republic engaged with the memory of fascism and the Holocaust, and how these legacies continue to shape political and cultural discourse in unified Germany.
His Leverhulme project, “The Answer to Auschwitz”?: Holocaust Memory and Antifascism in the Other Germany, explores how the GDR’s approaches to Holocaust commemoration influenced its political identity – and how these narratives have been reconstructed and contested since 1990.
Prior to his work in Liverpool, Dr Brown held a Research Associate position at Newcastle University on the AHRC-supported project Knowing the Secret Police: Secrecy and Knowledge in East German Society, which examined what ordinary East Germans knew about the Stasi and how that knowledge intersected with ideology and politics.
Dr Brown completed an AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2019 and has since published extensively on topics ranging from antifascist memory culture to key figures in East German intellectual life. His first monograph, Paul Merker, the GDR, and the Politics of Memory: “Purging Cosmopolitanism”? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), has been widely received as an important contribution to the field.
We look forward to seeing the exciting research Dr Brown will develop during his time with us at the LBI London.
