Andrew Ian Port (ar6647)

University information

Title: Professor
Unit: History
Department: College of Liberal Arts & Science

Contact information

313-577-6145
3094 FAB
History
Liberal Arts
Detroit, 48202

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Department:

History

Title: Professor
Phone: 313-577-2525
Fax: 313-577-6987
Biography:

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. It is one of five books shortlisted for the 2025 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies, which is considered "one of the preeminent book prizes in the field of European studies."

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." Reviews have already appeared in British, German, Israeli, and Bosnian media outlets, including Times Literary Supplement, History Today, Historische Zeitschrift, Israel Journal of Foreign AffairsJerusalem Post, London Review of Books, H-Diplo, Neue Politische Literatur, Historiijski Pogledi, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany's leading national dailies. According to Choice, Never Again is "unique and groundbreaking... Highly recommended."

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 has spent time abroad as a Leibniz Fellow at the Center for Contemporary Studies in Potsdam, Germany; as a Marie Curie Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS); and as a visiting professor in Nottingham in the United Kingdom, thanks to a generous award from the Leverhulme Trust.

A recipient at Wayne State of the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, as well as a Career Development Chair, Professor Port has also 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

Andrew Ian Port

Courses taught by Andrew Ian Port

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