Alan Kramer
is PI of BLOCKADE, Professor emeritus at Trinity College Dublin and from 1 May 2025 Senior Professor of Modern History at the University of Hamburg. He leads BLOCKADE’s Hamburg-based team that focuses on globalization, strategy and violence. It will examine the relationship between blockades and globalization/de-globalization. Blockades and counter-blockades affected culture and politics everywhere, including the colonial world and neutral states. It will therefore be essential to investigate national and transnational learning processes, including ‘pathological learning’, i.e., ‘lessons’ drawn from flawed data or myth narratives.
Alan Kramer studied at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and at Hamburg University, where he took his PhD. His research has ranged from the regional economic history of post-Second World War Germany to the transnational history of violence in Europe in the First World War. It now encompasses the extra-European sphere in both world wars and their interconnections. He has published on atrocities and war crimes, prisoners of war, fascist warfare, and memory. In recent years two global history projects have been at the centre of attention, (1) as founding co-editor of 1914-1918-Online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, and (2) as author of Concentration Camps. A Global History, due for publication by OUP in April 2025. The turn to the history of blockades reflects a revival of interest on economic history, along with a broadened concept of violence that encompasses not only visible, physical violence, but also invisible, ‘slow violence’, with its implications for the social, medical, and cultural history of war.
Alan Kramer is Fellow of the Royal Irish Academy, Fellow of the Humboldt Foundation, Germany, and recipient of the Humboldt Foundation Research Prize, 2015-16.