Andrew Port

Faculty Profile

Professor
ar6647@wayne.edu

Department

History

Phone

313-577-2525

Fax

313-577-6987

Office

3037 Faculty/Administration Building

Biography

Andrew I. Port grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and now lives in Ann Arbor. Before coming to Wayne State, he taught as a lecturer at Harvard University and at Yale University, where he earned his graduate and undergraduate degrees. He also worked as a project coordinator at the Office of Human Rights in Nuremberg, Germany; as a bartender and substitute schoolteacher for the US Army in Berlin; and as a paralegal at several major law firms in New York City. That last experience was one reason he decided to become a historian.

Port's newest book, Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, appeared in the spring of 2023 with the prestigious Belknap Imprint of Harvard University Press. Never Again looks at German reactions to genocide in other parts of the world after 1945, with a focus on Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. It is one of five books shortlisted for the 2025 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies, which is considered "one of the preeminent book prizes in the field of European studies."

Yale University's Samuel Moyn, the author of "Humane and The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History," calls it “the most important study of memory, politics, and the ongoing construction of public norms written in a long time.” Ian Buruma, former editor-in-chief of The New York Review of Books, describes Never Again as "fascinating, elegant, subtle, and always fair-minded." Reviews have already appeared in British, German, Israeli, and Bosnian media outlets, including Times Literary Supplement, History Today, Historische Zeitschrift, Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem Post, London Review of Books, H-Diplo, Neue Politische Literatur, Historiijski Pogledi, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany's leading national dailies. According to Choice, Never Again is "unique and groundbreaking... Highly recommended."

Port's first award-winning book, Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic, appeared in German translation as Die rätselhafte Stabilität der DDR and received a great deal of media attention in Germany. This included television, radio, and press reviews and interviews in leading German news outlets, such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Deutschlandfunk, Radio Berlin, and Deutschlandfunk Kultur. 

With Professor Mary Fulbrook of University College London, Port edited Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler. His next book will be a history of Germany from the end of World War II to the present. It will appear in "Polity Histories," a new series published by Polity Press in Cambridge, UK.

Port was editor-in-chief of Central European History, the flagship journal in its field (2018 Impact Factor: 0.481), from 2014 to 2019, and he previously served as the Review Editor of the German Studies Review from 2012 to 2014.

Andrew Port is the recipient of the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, awarded by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where he is a non-resident Fellow. He has spent time abroad as a Leibniz Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Studies in Potsdam, Germany; as a Marie Curie Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS); and as a visiting professor in Nottingham in the United Kingdom, thanks to a generous award from the Leverhulme Trust.

A recipient at Wayne State of the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, as well as a Career Development Chair, Professor Port has also held the Board of Governors Distinguished Faculty Fellowship (2018-2020). He has received support in the past from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the Krupp Foundation.

Port’s research focuses on modern Germany, communism and state socialism, memory and comparative genocide, labor history, and social protest. He has been frequently invited to lecture across the United States and Canada, as well as in Germany, the United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Israel. 

Port gave a series of interviews for Reunification Revisited, a multimedia, online project organized by the Goethe Institute of North America to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of German unification. He also reminisced in a front-page feature story that appeared in the Detroit Free Press about his own first-hand experiences in Berlin, where he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. To mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of that momentous event, he presented a brief, online overview of Berlin's importance during the Cold War at Eureka College in Illinois.

Port is a regular contributor to Public Seminar, the online journal of The New School. For his reflections on recent events in the Middle East, see "Germany, Genocide, and Gaza," which was reprinted in Eurozine. And on the events of January 6 in the U.S. Capitol, see "Embracing Democracy: The Storming of the US Capitol and the Mixed Lessons of Weimar Germany." Professor Port has also weighed in on a major debate about Holocaust memory in Germany and its connection to imperial history, postcolonialism, and contemporary Middle East politics: "The Wrath of Moses, or The Shadow Side of German Memory Culture." The New York Times recently published his take on the plagiarism scandal surrounding Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, as the lead letter to the editor in its printed edition.

Education

  • Ph.D., Harvard University, 2000
  • M.A., Harvard University, 1995
  • B.A., Yale University, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1989
  • C.E.P., Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po, Paris), avec mention, 1988

News mentions

 

Selected publications

Books

Articles, Chapters, Essays, Interviews

  • “Germany, Genocide, and Gaza,” Public Seminar, March 2024. Reprinted in Eurozine, March 2024.
  • “Ostalgie, Anglo-American-Style,” in Jahrbuch Deutsche Einheit, ed. Ralph Jessen, Marcus Böick, Constantin Goschler (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2024), 113-29.
  • “‘Never Again Auschwitz or ‘Never Again War’? An Interview with Andrew I. Port,” Journal of the History of Ideas, May 2023.
  • “The Wrath of Moses, or The Shadow Side of German Memory Culture,” New Fascism Syllabus (“Catechism Debate”), June 2021.
  • “Embracing Democracy: The Storming of the US Capitol and the Mixed Lessons of Weimar Germany,” Public Seminar, January 2021.
  • “Wschodnioniemieccy robotnicy I ‘ciemna strona’ samo-woli: Podziały społeczne w zakładach przemysłowych a porażka rewolucji z 17 czerwca 1953 roku,” in Eigen-Sinn: Życie codzienne, podmiotowość I sprawowanie władzy w XX wieku, ed. Thomas Lindenberger and Alf Lüdtke, trans. Antoni Górny et al. (Posnan: Wydawnictwo Nauka I Innowacje, 2018), 599-622.
  • Introduction, “In Memory of the ‘Two Helmuts’: The Lives, Legacies, and Historical Impact of Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl: A Forum,” Central European History 51, no. 2 (2018): 282-283.
  • Introduction and commentary, “Holocaust Scholarship and Politics in the Public Sphere: Reexamining the Causes, Consequences, and Controversy of the Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen Debate. A Forum,” Central European History 50, no. 3 (2017): 375-403.
  • “Awkward Encounters: East German Relations with the Third-World ‘Other,’” German History 35, no. 4 (2017): 630-637.
  • “Rethinking Regime Stability: The Life Stories of ‘Loyal’ East German Activists in the Early German Democratic Republic,” special issue of Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Ostdeutsche Unternehmen im Transformationsprozess (1935-1995) (November 2017): 367-412.
  • “All We are Saying Is Give GDR History a Chance!” in Die DDR als Chance. Neue Perspektive auf ein altes Thema, ed. Ulrich Mählert (Metropol: Berlin, 2016), 165-171.
  • “Courting China, Condemning China: East and West German Cold War Diplomacy in the Shadow of the Cambodian Genocide,” German History (Dec. 2015): 588-608.
  • “Central European History since 1989: Historiographical Trends and Other Post-Wende ’Turns,’” Central European History (June 2015): 238-248.
  • “History from Below, the History of Everyday Life, and Microhistory,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. 11, ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 108-113.
  • “Triumphalist History and Totalitarian Theory,” RARITAN (Spring 2014): 141-156.
  • “‘There Will Be Blood”: The Violent Underside of the ‘Peaceful’ East German Revolution of 1989,” in Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte: Politische Gewalt in Deutschland. Ursprünge – Ausprängungen – Konsequenzen, eds. José Brunner, Doron Avraham, and Marianne Zepp (Wallstein, 2014), 217-235.
  • “Introduction: The Banalities of East German Historiography,” in Mary Fulbrook and Andrew I. Port, eds., Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler (Berghahn, 2013), 1-30.
  • “Predispositions and the Paradox of Working-Class Behavior in Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic,” in Mary Fulbrook and Andrew I. Port, eds., Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler (Berghahn, 2013), 201-218.
  • “‘To Deploy or Not to Deploy’: The Erratic Evolution of German Foreign Policy since Unification,” in Konrad Jarausch, ed., United Germany: Debating Processes and Prospects (Berghahn, 2013), 267-277.
  • “The Dark Side of Eigensinn: East German Workers and Destructive Shopfloor Practices,” in Hartmut Berghoff and Uta Balbier, eds., Falling Behind or Catching Up? The East German Economy, 1945-2010 (Cambridge UP, 2013), 112-128.
  • “A Cold-War Cudgel? The West German Print Media and the Cambodian Genocide,” in Martin Sabrow, ed., ZeitRäume. Potsdamer Almanach des Zentrums für Zeithistorische Forschung 2010 (Wallstein Verlag, 2011), 147-159.
  • “Love, Lust, and Lies under Communism: Family Values and Adulterous Liaisons in the German Democratic Republic,” Central European History (Sept. 2011): 478-505.
  • “Democracy and Dictatorship in the Cold War: The Two Germanies, 1949-1961,” in Helmut W. Smith, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford UP, 2011), 619-643.
  • “Deutsche Gesellschaft und Mentalität im Wandel?” in Heiner Timmermann, ed., Historische Erinnerung im Wandel. Neuere Forschungen zur deutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte (LIT Verlag, 2007), 92-97.
  • “Der erste Arbeiteraufstand in der DDR,” in Deutschland Archiv 4 (2007): 605-613.
  • “Ringen um die Macht: Konflikte an der Basis der frühen DDR. Die Zeiss-Fertigungsstätte Saalfeld in den fünfziger Jahren,” in Rüdiger Stutz, ed., Macht und Milieu. Jena zwischen Kriegsende und Mauerbau (Hain Verlag, 2000), 307-326.
  • “The ‘Grumble Gesellschaft’: Industrial Defiance and Worker Protest in Early East Germany,” in Klaus Tenfelde and Peter Hübner, eds., Arbeiter in der SBZ/DDR (Klartext Verlag, 1999), 787-810.
  • “When Workers Rumbled: the Wismut Upheaval of August 1951 in East Germany,” in Social History, vol. 22, no. 2 (1997): 145-173.

Research Description

modern German and European history, comparative genocide, memory politics, communism and state socialism, labor history, social protest and popular resistance under autocratic regimes

Affiliated Departments