James Franklin Williamson
Ph.D. Student
Major Field: European History
Other Fields: Military History
Advisor: Konrad Jarausch
Research Interests: My dissertation examines public mourning practices in East- and West Germany after the Second World War. Im interested in how Germans thought about mourning and remembering their dead soldiers versus those German civilians killed in the war and those persecuted and murdered by the Nazis. Using officially-sanctioned days of public mourning as a site of contest, I am looking for continuities and changes over time in how German survivors of the war and successive generations defined whom they ought to collectively mourn and to what degree those collective mourning practices should resemble other such commemorations from earlier periods in German history.