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Dr Todd Weir

BA (Brown), MA (Humboldt) MPhil, PhD (Columbia)

Lecturer in Modern European History 

Modern history exams officer (L2) (sem 1)

Tel: +44 (0) 28 9097 3312
E-mail: t.weir@qub.ac.uk

Office: 17UQ.102

Todd Weir had been an undergraduate student of the developing world until a semester spent at an East German university in 1988 turned his interest towards Germany and the history of socialism. He later retrained as a historian, first at the Humboldt University in Berlin and then at Columbia University in New York. He was a research fellow at the Free University in Berlin while writing his dissertation, 'The Fourth Confession: atheism, Monism and politics in the Freigeistig movement in Berlin 1859–1924'. Dr Weir taught at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Seattle University and the University of Washington before joining Queen’s University in January 2007.

Research Interests

Dr Weir’s current research focuses on the relationships between religious dissent, anticlericalism, popular science and radical politics both in Germany and internationally between the 1840s and the 1930s. He has also written on East German collectivisation in the 1950s and the relationship of German socialism to colonialism prior to the First World War.  

Conferences Convened 

Dr Weir convened a Wiles Colloquium on October 2 and 3, 2009 at Queen's University. For more information, please go to our Wiles Colloquia section in News and Events: "The Monist Century 1845-1945: Science, Secularism and Worldview".

In 2008 Dr Weir initiated a university-wide programme of public lectures, films and an exhibit to mark the 40th anniversary of the epoch-making events of 1968: Turning Point 1968: A Year of Change from Belfast to Beijing .

Select Publications

Articles and chapters:

  • "Between Colonial Violence and Socialist Worldview: The Conversions of Ernst Däumig" in German History 28 (2010): 143-166. Click here to view article in online Oxford Journals
  • "The Secular Beyond: Free Religious Dissent and Debates over the Afterlife in Nineteenth-Century Germany" in Church History (2008)  Click here to view article in online Cambridge Journals.
  • '"Keine Lücke mehr im Menschen, worin das Jenseits sich einnisten könnte": Naturwissenschaft und Dissidenz in der frühen freireligiösen Bewegung' in Lucian Hölscher (ed.), Das Jenseits. Facetten eines religiösen Begriffs in der Neuzeit (Göttingen, 2007).
  • 'Towards a history and sociology of atheist religious community: the Berlin Free Religious Congregation 1845–1921' in Lucian Hölscher and Michael Geyer (eds), Die Gegenwart Gottes in der Modernen Gesellschaft(Göttingen, 2006).
  • '"Von Schwindel Befallen’ – Enthusiasmus, Inszenierung und Chaos im stalinistischen Aufbau am Beispiel der Kollektivierung der DDR-Landwirtschaft 1952–3' in Arpad von Klimo and Malte Rolf (eds) Rausch und Diktatur (Frankfurt, 2006).
  • 'The secularization of religious dissent: anticlerical politics and the Freigeistige Movement in Germany 1844–1933' in Manuel Franzmann, Christel Gärtner and Nicole Köck (eds), Religiosität in der säkularisierten Welt (Wiesbaden, 2006).
  • 'Der Rausch im Plan: Ursachen und Folgen der Inszenierung von "Klassenkampf" in der Kollektivierung der DDR-Landwirtschaft 1952–1953' in Deutschland Archiv, ii (2004).

 

Teaching

Dr Todd Weir teaches on the following programmes / modules. He was winner of the 2010 H-German syllabus contest for best module on Nazi/Holocaust history): Fascism and its Legacy in Germany: 1918 to 2005.

Undergraduate

HIS3038

Socialism, the history of the idea