Keith Allen, Ph.D., 1997
March 29, 2017
I’ve spent most of the past two decades employed as an applied historian. Since completing my Ph.D. I’ve served on an international scholarly commission in Bern investigating Switzerland's wartime ties to Nazi Germany, directed web content development at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, and curated the first pan-European exhibition on the legacies of World War II in Brussels. While I’ve mainly completed projects on behalf of clients, I’ve also been able to pursue my own research. In 2014, I obtained funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) to complete the first study of migrant security vetting in Germany after 1945. Entitled Interrogation Nation: Refugees and Spies in Cold War Germany, my account will be published in June 2017 by Rowman and Littlefield. It draws on newly declassified files in American, British, Czech, as well as East and West German archives to trace the places, personalities, and practices associated with questioning newcomers to western Germany.
I live in Berlin, where I recently accepted a position as a Research Scholar at the Institute for Contemporary History (Institut für Zeitgeschichte – Munich and Berlin). My project considers state-sponsored privatization measures adopted in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I also teach a history course for Dartmouth College’s Foreign Studies Program in Berlin each autumn.