Time: Monday, 06 June 2011, 15:00

Venue: Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres, Nussdorfer Strasse 64, 4th floor
 
Lecturer: Prof. Sandrine Kott

Title: Beyond the Cold War: International Organizations and East-West Circulation (1947-1973)

In this presentation, Sandrine Kott will question the overall Cold War discourse by studying the circulation of knowledge and experts between the two blocs. For this purpose, international organizations such as the International Labor Organization and the United Nations’ European Commission for Europe will be used as laboratories of transnational social venues, where Cold War discourses were produced but where exchanges between the blocs were simultaneously made possible and even encouraged. She will show that these exchanges were grounded in continuing relations between expert networks which had been consolidated in the interwar period. But they also emerged from the necessity of facing common, inter-bloc questions, first in the reconstruction period and later in the modernization time.

Sandrine Kott is teaching European contemporary history at Geneva University. She studied history at University Paris VII-Diderot, at Bielefeld University, and at Columbia University. She has taught history as an assistant professor at the University of Poitiers and been awarded a Junior Fellowship at the Institut universitaire de France (1997-2002). Her research interests are the German social state and the German Democratic Republic society and she is currently working on a global history of labour as seen through the International labour organization. She has published over 80 articles in French, German and Anglo-Saxon journals and collective volumes, edited or co-edited four volumes and published six monographs, the latest of which is La société de RDA, Paris, La Découverte, 2011.