Eva Giloi

Eva Giloi

Rutgers University, Newark

Late Modern Germany

Statment: Eva Giloi is a German historian with a PhD from Princeton University. She is working on a book manuscript, Authors and Epigones, which tells the story of six authors of middling success in Wilhelmine Germany, from a wide range of class, educational, gender, and political backgrounds. Using their life trajectories as case studies to examine the modernization of German society, the book focuses on Germany’s social democratization, not only in formal political activity, but in the interactions between social norms and economic changes including new expectations about merit, audience, consumer culture, authenticity, individualism, genius, the link between authority and value, social fluidity, rootlessness and mobility, and polycontexturality. The book uses the authors’ biographical narratives as an anchor to study the challenges faced by fin-de-siècle Germans, and through these microhistories reveals the subterranean mentalities in the fissures between discourse and praxis.
Alongside her work in German history, she is developing a project on urban thresholds, access and affect in city spaces, the phenomenology of place, and other topics in urban geography. In the past three years she has acted as the Director of Newark Rhythms, a multi-year public history, visual arts, and sonic-spatial arts project relating to the 1960s Rutgers-Newark campus.

egiloi@ias.edu

While at IAS: Office: F-303 Phone: 609-734-8272

Member in Residence for: Year