5. Board Member - Politics, Economics, Society

Robert Mark Spaulding (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1989) is Professor of History at UNC Wilmington. He was a Visiting Professor at Peking University in 2004. Prof. Spaulding's research and teaching interests center on German, European, and global political economy, particularly trade, and international relations. He teaches regularly at all levels of the curriculum from HST 101 to graduate courses on Weimar and Nazi Germany. His book Osthandel and Ostpolitik from Bismarck to Adenauer (Berghahn, 1997) was a finalist for the AHA’s prize as best book in European International History. He has just completed a short book for undergraduates, The Global Medieval: Trade and Contact in Four Great Ports of the Afro-Eurasian World, 1000-1500 (Cognella, 2020). His essays on German, European, and global trade have appeared in numerous journals, including Agricultural History, Central European History, Diplomatic History, the Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, and in several important collections such as the Oxford Handbook of the Cold War. He has also published in International Organization, the leading journal of international relations. He organized the 40th anniversary forum for Mack Walker’s German Home Towns that appeared in Central European History (September 2014). He was Guest Editor of the special thematic issue “New Research on Cities and Towns in Central Europe” for German History (September 2017). In 2006 and 2020 he was an invited participant at week-long seminars at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. His research has been funded by the DAAD, the Council for European Studies, the Ford Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society. He has presented, moderated, and commented at many GSA panels since his first GSA presentation in 1993. Prof. Spaulding was a member of the GSA Program Committee in 2015 and 2016.

Jonathan R. Zatlin (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 2000) is Associate Professor of History at Boston University, where he also served as Associate Director of Kilachand Honors College (2012-2016). His initial work explored the history of German communism, focusing on the social construction of value in East Germany to understand German unification. Out of that research emerged The Currency of Socialism. Money and Political Culture in East Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany (Duke University Press, 2007), co-edited with Jonathan Wiesen and Pamela Swett, and over two dozen book chapters and articles in journals such as Central European History, German History, German Politics and Society, American Historical Review, Contemporary European History, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, and Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft. More recently, he has turned from the category of class to the problem of race in German history. He co-edited Dispossession: Plundering German Jewry, 1933-1953 (University of Michigan Press, 2020) with Christoph Kreutzmüller and is currently completing his second monograph, German Fantasies of Jewish Wealth, 1790-1990 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). He was awarded the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize in 2001, the Hans Rosenberg Article Prize in 2011, and the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies in 2011. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the DAAD, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. He has also been active in professional organizations related to German history, serving on the executive board of the Central European History Society (2013-2016), the editorial board of Central European History (2014-2017), and the academic advisory board of the Leo Baeck Institute-New York (2016-present). He has been a regular attendee at GSA meetings since grad school, and in 2019 served on the GSA Program Committee.