History

Senior Lecturer

(on Sabbatical 2012-13)

Office: 401, 23 Gordon Square
Office hour: Tuesday 4-5
External phone: 020 7679 7396
Internal phone: 37396
E-mail: b.rieger@ucl.ac.uk

My broad area of interest include nineteenth and twentieth century Europe, especially the societies, economies and cultures of Britain and Germany. In recent years, I have also worked on the United States as well as Mexico since 1945. I teach the survey course on Europe from 1870 to 1945 and currently act as the Graduate Tutor for the department's doctoral students.

My publications include a comparative book on British and German attitudes to technology between 1870 and 1945 as well as a co-edited volume on British modernity during that period. Another co-edited book on how West Germany adjusted to rapid political, social and cultural transformation in the Fifties and Sixties appeared in 2011. At present, I am completing a global history of Volkswagen Beetle for Harvard University Press, a project that traces the car's journey from failed National Socialist prestige project to iconic prominence in Western Europe, the United States and Mexico.

Areas of Research Supervision: Germany in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Great Britain in the Twentieth Century and culture in the United States since 1945, social and cultural history, history of technology

Theses Currently Supervised

 - Germany and Italy in the Seventies: Mutual Perception in a Decade of Crisis

 - At the Touch of a Button: The Culture of Effortless Control in Postwar America

 - Justice by Judicial Notice: The War Crimes at Nordhausen-Dora Concentration Camp Under American Review, 1947 (with Mary Fulbrook, German Department)

Theses Recently Completed

 - Working-Class Cinema in the Ruhr area and South Wales, c. 1945-1975

Select Publications 

Book:

Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945 (Cambridge, 2005)

Edited Books:
- Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, (Oxford 2001), with Martin Daunton

- Mit dem Wandel leben: Neuorientierungund Tradition in der Bundesrepublik der 1950er und 60er Jahre (Cologne, 2011) with Friedrich Kießling

Articles:

- 'From People's Car to New Beetle: The Transatlantic Journeys of the Volkswagen Beetle', The Journal of American History, 97:1 (2010) 91-115 (winner of the Binkley-Stephenson Award from the Organization of American Historians for best article published in JAH in 2010)

- '"The Good German" Goes Global: The Volkswagen Beetle as an icon in the Federal Republic', History Workshop Journal, 68 (2009) 3-26

- 'Memory and Normality', History and Theory, 47:4 (2008) 560-572

- 'Hanna Reitsch: The Global Career of a Nazi Celebrity', German History, 26:3 (2008), 383-405

- 'Was Roland a Nazi? Victims, perpetrators, and Silences during the Restoration of Civic Identity in Post War Bremen', History and Memory 17:2 (2007) 75-112

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