Biographical Summary

Andrew Tompkins is a historian of transnational relations in 20th-century Europe and a researcher at the German Historical Institute Warsaw, where his work examines the history of the German-Polish (as well as German-French) border during the Cold War from the perspectives of environmental and everyday history.

His first monograph, Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany, was published in 2016 with Oxford University Press. It examines the anti-nuclear energy movement in order to understand how transnational protest networks function. In 2023-2024, Andrew Tompkins was wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (Assistant Professor) at the Chair for the History of Western Europe at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where he previously held a Humboldt Post-Doc Fellowship from 2013 to 2016. He has also worked as Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Sheffield (2016-2020) and held a DAAD Fellowship at the Universität Erfurt and the Uniwersytet Wrocławski.

Andrew Tompkins received his doctorate (DPhil) from the University of Oxford in 2013 after previously receiving M.A. degrees in History from the University of Chicago (2007-2008) and in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po).


Current GHI Research Project

Transnational history of Europe since 1945, with particular emphasis on social and environmental history. Areas of research include:

  • Contemporary history of Germany, Poland and France
  • interdisciplinary border studies
  • social movements and protest

Publications

Monograph

Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany, Oxford University Press (Oxford Historical Monographs series), 2016 [265 pp., 978-0-19-87705-6].

Editorships

The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2022) [doi:10.11647/OBP.0323] (jointly with Jan Hansen, Jochen Hung, Jaroslav Ira, Judit Klement, Sylvain Lesage, and Juan Luis Simal).

Special issue on ‘The Material Culture of Modern Politics in Cold War Europe’, History, Culture and Modernity, Vol 6, No. 1, 2018 [https://brill.com/view/journals/hcm/6/1/hcm.6.issue-1.xml] (jointly with Jan Hansen, Jochen Hung and Phillip Wagner).

Articles in Academic Journals

ʻCaught in the Net: Fish, Ships, and Oil in the GDR-Poland Territorial Waters Dispute, 1945-1989ʼ, Central European History, Special Issue ‘Everyday Transnationalism, Global Entanglements and Regimes of Mobility at the Edges of East Germany’ (2023) [doi:10.1017/S0008938922001029].

ʻGenerating Post-Modernity: Nuclear Energy Opponents and the Future in the 1970sʼ, European Review of History/Revue européenne d'histoire, 28, 4 (2021), pp. 507–530 [doi:10.1080/13507486.2021.1881047].

‘Binding the Nation, Bounding the State: Germany and its Borders’, German History, 37, 1 (2019), pp. 77–100 [doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghy116].

‘Introduction:  The Material Culture of Politics’, History, Culture and Modernity, 6, 1 (2018) [doi:10.18352/hcm.537] (jointly with Jan Hansen, Jochen Hung and Phillip Wagner).

‘Grassroots Transnationalism(s): Franco-German Opposition to Nuclear Energy in the 1970s’, Contemporary European History, 25, 1 (2016), pp. 117–142 [doi:10.1017/S0960777315000508].

‘The Transnational in the Local: The Larzac Plateau as a Site of Transnational Activism since 1970’, Journal of Contemporary History, 50, 3 (2015), pp. 581–605 [doi:10.1177/0022009414557909] (jointly with Robert Gildea).

‘Transnationality as a Liability? The Anti-Nuclear Movement at Malville’, in Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire / Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis, 89, 3-4 (2011), pp. 1365–1379 [doi:10.3406/rbph.2011.8361].

Book Chapters

ʻAn ‘Ecological Internationale’? Nuclear Energy Opponents in Western Europe, 1975-1980ʼ, in M. Di Donato and M. Fulla (eds.), The Left and the International Arena: A Transnational Political History (London, 2023) [doi:10.5040/9781350252523.ch-14].

ʻ„Unter vorläufiger französischer Verwaltung“. Staatsterritorium, Grundbesitz und die Grenzen des Deutschen Reiches in der westlichen Bundesrepublikʼ, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 49 (2022), pp. 174–216 [ISBN: 978-3-8353-5079-3].

ʻTowards a “Europe of Struggles”? Three Visions of Europe in the Early Anti-Nuclear Energy Movement, 1975–79ʼ, in C. Wenkel, E. Bussière, A. Grisoni and H. Miard-Delacroix (eds.), The Environment and the European Public Sphere: Perceptions, Actors, Policies: Environmental Issues in European Perspective (Cambridge, 2020), pp. 124–146 [ISBN: 978-1-912186-14-3].

ʻAlle Wege führen nach Gorleben. Transnationale Netzwerke der Anti-AKW-Bewegung der 1970er Jahreʼ, in D. Schmiechen-Ackermann, C. Hellwig, W. Stegmann, K. Quambusch and J. Hagemann (eds.), Der Gorleben-Treck 1979: Anti-Atom-Protest als soziale Bewegung und demokratischer Lernprozess (Göttingen, 2020), pp. 150–172 [ISBN: 978-3-8353-3793-0].

Textbook Chapters

The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, 2022):

  • ‘Borders in Contemporary Europe’ (jointly with Lorena de Vita, Jaroslav Ira and Thomas Serrier) [doi:10.11647/OBP.0323.06]
  • ‘Protest and Social Movements in Contemporary Europe’ (jointly with Claire Barillé, Kostis Kornetis and Erika Szívós) [doi:10.11647/OBP.0323.39]
  • ‘Understanding and Controlling the Environment in Contemporary Europe’ (jointly with Jiří Janáč, Sophie Lange and Juan Pan-Montojo) [doi:10.11647/OBP.0323.51]

Book Reviews

Review of Dominik Gerst et al (eds.), Grenzforschung: Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Studium, H-Soz-u-Kult (2021) [https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-95728].

Review of Astrid Eckert, West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands, German History (2021) [doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghab008].

Review of Dolores Augustine, Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present, German Studies Review, 44, 1 (2021), pp. 208–210 [doi:10.1353/gsr.2021.0028].

Review of Stephen Milder, Greening Democracy: The Anti-Nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968-1983, H-German Reviews, (August 2020) [https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=50154].

Review of Andrew W. M. Smith, Terror and Terroir: The Winegrowers of the Languedoc and Modern France, French History, 32, 4 (December 2018), pp. 615–617 [doi:10.1093/fh/cry078].

Review of Eleanor Davey, Idealism beyond Borders: The French Revolutionary Left and the Rise of Humanitarianism, 1954–1988, Social History, 43, 1 (January 2018), pp. 156–158 [doi:10.1080/03071022.2017.1397367].

Review of Nancy A. Naples and Jennifer Bickham Mendez (eds.), Border Politics: Social Movements, Collective Identities, and Globalization,

Journal of Contemporary History, 52, 2 (April 2017), pp. 474-476 [doi:10.1177/0022009416688182o].

Review of Timothy Scott Brown, West Germany and the Global 1960s: The Antiauthoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978, German History, 32, 3 (September 2014), pp. 507-509 [doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghu024].

Conference report on Phantomgrenzen in Ostmitteleuropa: Zwischenbilanz eines neuen Forschungskonzeptes. 17.-19. Februar 2014, Berlin, H-Soz-u-Kult (2014) [https://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-5310].

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