History > About > People Directory >

Sean Forner

Associate Professor

116 Old Horticulture

(517) 884-4868

saforner@msu.edu

Biography

I am a historian of 20th-century Europe and Germany interested in intersections of intellectual history and political culture, or social and political imaginaries. My primary focus is on ideas and practices of democracy after the World Wars, especially in moments of destabilization and experimentation (e.g., around 1945, 1956, 1968, 1989). I have also written on memory and representation and issues of method and theory. My teaching ranges from lower-level and general-education courses on the Eur

Publications

Book: German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2014; paperback 2017)

Article: "Intellectuals and the People: Conversation Forums and West German Democracy in the 1950s.” In The Arts of Democratization: Styling Political Sensibilities in Postwar West Germany, ed. Jennifer Kapczynski and Caroline Kita, 37-59. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2022.

Article: “Imaginary Intellectual History and ‘Managerialism’ in 1950s West Germany.” In Ideengeschichte heute: Traditionen und Perspektiven, ed. D. Timothy Goering, 69-94. Bielefeld: transcript, 2017.

...