J. Laurence Hare

Ph.D. Student
hare@email.unc.edu

Major Field: Modern European History

Other Fields: German History; Intellectual and Cultural History; Global History; Anthropology/Archaeology

Advisor: Konrad Jarausch

Research Interests: My primary areas of research include modern European intellectual and cultural history, with a regional emphasis on Germany and Scandinavia. I am particularly interested in studies of nationalism, and my current work focuses on the uses of the distant past for creating modern national identities. More specifically, I am studying how competing visions of the past are constructed and negotiated both within national communities and between nation-states. In my dissertation project, "Claiming Valhalla: Archaeology, Nordic Antiquity, and National Identity in Germany and Denmark, 1895-1956," I am tracing two generations of professional archaeologists in Germany and Denmark in order to explain their role in claiming and contesting shared heritages for diverging nationalist ends and to assess the influence of their work on the broader public consciousness and on German-Danish political and intellectual relations.