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Andrew I. Port

Andrew I. Port

Professor

313-577-2525

313-577-6987 (fax)

andrew.port@wayne.edu

3037 Faculty/Administration Building

Department

History

Andrew I. Port

Andrew I. Port grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and now lives in Ann Arbor. Before coming to Wayne State, he taught as a lecturer at Harvard University and at Yale University, where he earned his graduate and undergraduate degrees. He also worked as a project coordinator at the Office of Human Rights in Nuremberg, Germany.

His newest book, Never Again: Germans and Genocide after the Holocaust, appeared in the spring of 2023 with the prestigious Belknap Imprint of Harvard University Press. Never Again looks at German reactions to genocide in other parts of the world after 1945, with a focus on Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Yale University's Samuel Moyn, the author of Humane and The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, calls it “the most important study of memory, politics, and the ongoing construction of public norms written in a long time.” Ian Buruma, former editor-in-chief of The New York Review of Books, describes Never Again as "fascinating, elegant, subtle, and always fair-minded." The book has already been reviewed in Times Literary Supplement, History Today, The Jerusalem Post, London Review of Books, H-Diplo, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany's leading national dailies.

Port's first award-winning book, Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic, appeared in German translation as Die rätselhafte Stabilität der DDR and received a great deal of media attention in Germany. This included television, radio, and press reviews and interviews in leading German news outlets, such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Deutschlandfunk, Radio Berlin, and Deutschlandfunk Kultur. 

With Professor Mary Fulbrook of University College London, Port edited Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler. His next book will be a history of Germany from the end of World War II to the present. It will appear in "Polity Histories," a new series published by Polity Press in Cambridge, UK.

Port was editor-in-chief of Central European History, the flagship journal in its field (2018 Impact Factor: 0.481), from 2014 to 2019, and he previously served as the Review Editor of the German Studies Review from 2012 to 2014.

Andrew Port is the recipient of the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, awarded by the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University, where he is a non-resident Fellow. He spent the first half of 2016 in Freiburg, Germany, as a Marie Curie Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS), and four months in 2018 as a visiting professor in Nottingham in the United Kingdom, thanks to a generous award from the Leverhulme Trust.

A past recipient at Wayne State of the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, as well as a Career Development Chair, Professor Port recently held the Board of Governors Distinguished Faculty Fellowship (2018-2020). He has received support in the past from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the Krupp Foundation.

Port’s research focuses on modern Germany, communism and state socialism, memory and comparative genocide, labor history, and social protest. He has been frequently invited to lecture across the United States and Canada, as well as in Germany, the United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Israel. 

Port recently gave a series of interviews for Reunification Revisited, a multimedia, online project organized by the Goethe Institute of North America to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of German unification. He also reminisced in a front-page feature story that appeared in the Detroit Free Press about his own first-hand experiences in Berlin, where he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. 

Port is a regular contributor to Public Seminar, the online journal of The New School. For his reflections on recent events in the Middle East, see "Germany, Genocide, and Gaza," which was reprinted in Eurozine. And on the events of January 6 in the U.S. Capitol, see "Embracing Democracy: The Storming of the US Capitol and the Mixed Lessons of Weimar Germany." Professor Port has also weighed in on a major debate about Holocaust memory in Germany and its connection to imperial history, postcolonialism, and contemporary Middle East politics: "The Wrath of Moses, or The Shadow Side of German Memory Culture." The New York Times recently published his take on the plagiarism scandal surrounding Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, as the lead letter to the editor in its printed editon.

Education

  • Ph.D., Harvard University, 2000
  • M.A., Harvard University, 1995
  • B.A., Yale University, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, 1989
  • C.E.P., Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Sciences Po, Paris), avec mention, 1988

Awards and grants

  • Board of Governors Distinguished Faculty Fellowship, Wayne State University, 2018-2020
  • Leverhulme Trust, Visiting Professor, Nottingham Trent University (UK), 2018
  • Marie Curie Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS), 2016
  • DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, 2013
  • President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, Wayne State University, 2012
  • Career Development Chair, Wayne State University, 2010-2011
  • Leibniz Summer Fellowship, Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, Potsdam, Germany, 2010
  • Board of Governors Faculty Recognition Award, Wayne State University, 2008
  • Excellence in Teaching Award, CLAS, Wayne State University, 2008
  • Summer Research Grant, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation 2006, 2013
  • University Research Grant, Wayne State University, 2004
  • Fritz Stern Prize, German Historical Institute, finalist, 2001
  • Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities, Harvard University, 1997-1998
  • Derek Bok Award for Distinction in Teaching, Harvard University, 1997
  • Federal Chancellor Fellowship, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, 1995-1996
  • Krupp Foundation Fellowship, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 1994-1995
  • Max Weber Fellowship, Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 1991-1993

News mentions

 

Selected publications

Books

Courses taught by Andrew I. Port

Fall Term 2024 (future)

Spring-Summer Term 2024 (future)

Winter Term 2024 (current)

Fall Term 2023

Winter Term 2023

Fall Term 2022

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