An Age of Walls?

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Are we living in an Age of Walls? Talk of walls is of course all around us, from heated political rhetoric about building a wall on America’s southernmost border to more amorphous references to the walls of our psyches or firewalls blocking the flow of digital data. In this episode of the History Workshop podcast, HWO’s Laura Forster talks to historian Paul Betts, author of Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic.

Berlin Wall remains. Courtesy Slaunger / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)

History Workshop Podcast · The Age Of Walls

Laura Forster

Laura C. Forster is an editorial fellow at HWO and a post-doc at Birkbeck, working on progressive ideas and internationalism in early twentieth-century Britain. She is writing a book on the political exiles of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the longer intellectual and cultural afterlives of the Commune in Britain, provisionally titled The Paris Commune in Britain: Radicals, Refugees, and Revolutionaries since 1871. Laura is interested in histories of transnational activism, informal cultures of political and intellectual exchange, the social history of ideas, political exile, and queer spaces past and present. She tweets @lauracforster

Paul Betts

Paul Betts teaches Modern European History at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and is the author of several books, most recently Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after the Second World War (Profile UK/ Basic US, 2020). He has co-edited seven books, including (with Jennifer Evans and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann) The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and 20^th Century German History (Berghahn, 2018) and (with Steve Smith), Religion, Science and Communism in Cold War Europe (London: Palgrave, 2016). From 2014 to 2018 he was Co-Investigator of a 4-year AHRC-funded collaborative project on “Socialism Goes Global: Connecting the Second and Third Worlds.”

One Comment

Valerie Mainstone says:

4 years ago

I’m so sorry the sound wasn’t clear enough for me to follow what was being said. Is there any chance of having subtitles? I would love to know what Marybeth had to say.

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