Allison Rodriguez
Ph.D. Student
aarodrig@email.unc.edu
Major Field: Modern European History
Other Fields: 19th and 20th C. Germany; Eastern European History; Gender History
Advisor: Karen Hagemann
Bio: Allison Rodriguez is a doctoral Student at UNC
Chapel Hill. She finished her B.A. in History (Concentration in Modern
European History) and English (Concentration in Medieval/Renaissance
Literature and Drama) in 2005 at Cornell University. She completed her
M.A. Thesis, “Beyond Dichotomies: Representing and Rewriting Prisoner
Functionaries in Holocaust Historiography,” in April 2007 at the
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, under the direction of Dr.
Christopher Browning. The Thesis focused on the role of prisoner
functionaries in concentration camps. It examined how they thought of
themselves, as well as how they have been represented in Holocaust
historiography. She is currently a member of the UNC Graduate
Working Group in Gender History. Her teaching and research
interests include Modern German and Eastern European History and Gender
History.
Abstract of Dissertation Project: "Germans, Poles, Silesians: Nationalizing the Local During the First World War"
The project focuses on the nationalizing pressures exerted on Upper Silesia during the First World War. In the last half of the nineteenth century, both German and Polish strains of nationalism began to force themselves onto Silesians, who had (and to a certain extent still do) a very strong sense of regional identity. The project asks to what extent war served as a catalyst for nationalization in the region. What effect does war have on a region in which nationalism is fluid? Does it indeed galvanize the people, or do they simply use the rhetoric of nationalism to further their own interests? How do other identities (to religion, class, gender and political persuasion) play against the national? While works on Western European nations’ experiences of the war are quite numerous, the historiography on Eastern Europe during the First World War remains quite thin. This project aims to fill in this void.