Dr. Johnson gets a DAAD

Dr. Molly Johnson has won a Faculty Research Visit Grant from the German Academic Exchange Service/DAAD. Germany’s “Fulbright Commission,” so to speak, will sponsor her travel to Germany for two months in Summer 2008 to continue research on her new project on “Collective Living, Social Experimentation, and Cultural Critique in Postwar West Berlin.” Funding from the UAH Humanities Center allowed Dr. Johnson to begin her research on this project last summer.

Dr. Johnson studies how counter-culture West Berliners in the late 1960s shared a critique of bourgeois society, mass consumption, and the nuclear family. They organized communes, squatters’ communities, automobile colonies, and collective apartment communities (Wohngemeinschaften). Examining the ideals of the communards, she situates their experiments within the history of utopian socialist movements of the early nineteenth century and communal practices that emerged internationally in the late Sixties.


Dr. Johnson stays busy. Over the next two months, she will complete final revisions to her book manuscript, Training Socialist Citizens: Sports and the State in East Germany, under contract with the Studies in Central European Histories Series with Brill Academic Publishers. Congratulations Dr. Johnson!