The history department is pleased to welcome Andrew Demshuk among its ranks. Demshuk, a specialist in central European history, is the author of The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945–1970 (Cambridge, 2012). He joins us from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he taught for five years. At AU, Demshuk teaches courses on modern German and East European history, as well as nationalism, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and the politics of memory in urban planning. He hopes to build upon the legacy of longtime professor Richard Breitman, who retired in 2015 after four decades at AU. Recently returned from a seventeen-month research trip in Germany and Poland supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Demshuk is currently working on his manuscript for a comparative analysis of ideology and public response in post-1945 urban reconstruction in three cities that had once belonged to the German Reich and were then rebuilt by three differing successor regimes: Frankfurt (West Germany), Leipzig (East Germany), and Wroclaw (Poland). He has also completed a new book (under contract with Oxford) that measures public response to the East German Communist demolition of Leipzig’s 15th-century University Church in 1968 (just months before the Prague Spring crackdown across the border) as a means of measuring the relationship between regime and populace in the so-called People’s State.