Julia Ault | Associate Chair
Associate Professor
Julia Ault
Associate Chair
Associate Professor
801/585-7405
CTIHB 327
About
I am a historian of modern Europe with an emphasis on postwar communism in East Germany and eastern Europe, the environment, and transnational connections. My first book explored environmental politics and protest in East Germany, treating it as a physical and cultural hinge between eastern and western Europe. As such, the book traced East German connections to both green politics in West Germany and protest in communist Poland. My current project explores the political, social, and environmental impact of East German experts in the socialist and non-aligned worlds, especially considering their use of science and technology as a form of solidarity and exploitation.
- Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- M.A., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
- B.A., Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA
Modern German, European, and Environmental History
- Saving Nature under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968-1990. New Studies in European History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
- “A River Runs Through It: The Elbe, Socialist Security, and East Germany’s Borders,” Central European History 56, No. 2 (June 2023), Special Issue on “The GDR’s Global Borders.”
- “Dictatorship and Environment: East Germany and the Limits of Change,” Forum on “Democracy and Climate,” Journal of Modern European History (August 2022)
- With Thomas Fleischman, “Germany, the Environment, and the End of Communism: A Conversation,” Reading the New Global Order: Textual Transformations of 1989. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
- “East German Environmental Activism and the West: Connections, Common Ground, and Difference across the Iron Curtain,” Rethinking Social Movements after 68: Selves and Solidarities in West Germany and Beyond, edited by Friederike Brühöfener, Belinda Davis, and Stephen Milder. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022.
- “Defending God’s Creation? The Environment in State, Church and Society in the GDR, 1975-1989.” German History 37, No. 2 (June 2019): 205-226.
- “Aquatic Conundrums: East German Environmental Protection and Water Shortages, 1963-1989,” Ecologies of Socialisms: Germany, Nature, and the Left in History, Politics, and Culture, edited by Sabine Moedersheim, Scott Moranda, and Eli Rubin, 201-226. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2019.
- “Protesting Pollution: Environmental Activism in East Germany and Poland, 1980-1990,” Nature's Iron Curtain: Cold War Environmentalism in Capitalist and Communist Countries, edited by Astrid Mignon Kirchhof and John R. McNeill, 151-168. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.
HIST 2100: Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
HIST 2200: World since 1945
HIST 3100: Historian’s Craft
HIST 3160: Soviet Union
HIST 3190: Modern Germany
HIST 3210: Age of Total War
HIST 3220: Postwar Europe
HIST 3910: Holocaust and Memory
HIST 4990: Global Cold War
International Travel Research Grant, College of Humanities, University of Utah, 2015, 2017, 2022
Faculty Teaching Award for Excellence in General Education, University of Utah, 2022
Tanner Humanities Center Faculty Fellowship, University of Utah, Fall 2021
ACLS Incentive Fellowship, College of Humanities, University of Utah, Fall 2020
Faculty Development Award, History Department, University of Utah, 2019
Faculty Research and Creative Grant, University Research Council, University of Utah, 2018
Dissertation Grant, Central European History Society (CEHS), Summer 2014
Free University Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, Research Fellowship, 2012-2013
Andrew W. Mellon Pre-Dissertation Research Fellowship, Council for European Studies at Columbia University, Summer 2011
Fulbright English Teaching Assistant Fellowship, Jena, Germany, 2008-2009