Oded Y. Steinberg, "Race, Nation, History: Anglo-German Thought in the Victorian Era" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

Jun 25, 2020

Race, Nation, History

Anglo-German Thought in the Victorian Era

Oded Y. Steinberg

Hosted by George Giannakopoulos

Summary

Oded Y. Steinberg (DPhil Oxford) is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Conversion and Inter-Religious Encounters, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Next year (2020-21), Steinberg will begin his joint tenure-track position at the Department of International Relations and the European Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Steinberg’s research, as an intellectual historian of international relations, is primarily focused on the exchange of ideas across social and national borders in modern Britain and central Europe. Within this framework, his publications have explored various aspects of British and central European intellectual, cultural and diplomatic history. His book Race, Nation, History: Anglo-German Thought in the Victorian Era (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) focuses on two intertwined themes. First, he analyses the emergence of a particular notion of a “Teutonic” identity among a group of scholars in England and Germany, and how they utilized this notion in their identification of their own national communities. Second, he shows how the consideration of this “Teutonic” identity corresponded with these scholars’ idiosyncratic perception of historical periodization. In exploring these themes, the book develops a novel argument that highlights the intersections between modern ideas of periodization, on the one hand, and modern perceptions of “race,” on the other. Therefore, it sheds light on a unique yet overlooked aspect of the modern racial and national identity discourse as it was developed by various Anglo-German Victorian scholars.