Dr Maiken Umbach - research

CURRENT PROJECT

Decentred Dictatorships: The Regional in Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s Spain (with Xosé-Manoel Núñez). This book, to be published by OUP, aims to uncover fascism’s political, cultural and ideological reliance on the region as the site of a distinctive identity politics. This involved the re-moulding of existing regions into nodal points of fascist identity politics, in a bid to ground the identity of subjects in seemingly immutable and ‘authentic’ regional homelands.

-  Modernism and the Bourgeois Habitus.  Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, the sense of place has played an important role: as a refuge from the impact of modernization, as a strategy of resistance, but also, as is less well known, as a positive contribution to the evolution of modernism itself. This is explored in my co-edited volume on "Vernacular Modernism" (SUP, 2005). My monograph, "German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924" (OUP, 2009), analyses the connection between the built environment and the 'habitus' of Buergerlichkeit, which I see as analogous to the emergence of liberal governmentality in Britain.

- The longue durée of the federal imagination. In various articles and in my edited volume German Federalism: Past, Present, Future, I have explored political imaginaries of regional identity and federalism in Germany from the 18th to the 20th centuries.

- Enlightenment Cultures and Politics. My book Federalism and Enlightenment in Germany, 1740-1806 and related articles traced English-inspired ideas of improvement in the formation of a brand of Enlightenment characteristic of the smaller territories of the Holy Roman Empire. Visual evidence is central to my argument: the famous landscape garden of Wörlitz, with its English-inspired Neo-Palladian iconography and 'gothic' regionalism, was the key 'text' that defined emergent German federalism.