Last week I was back in Berlin for the first time in nearly 18 months, participating in an event at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt entitled After the Wildly Improbable. Invited by the event’s curator, award-winning author Adania Shibli, I made a modest contribution to a broader effort by a whole a host of … More After the Wildly Improbable
Indiana Jones is returning to our screens. After the disappointment of The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull back in 2008 – a film widely critiqued for ‘jumping the shark’ or more specifically ‘nuking the fridge’ – Indy is now making a comeback in a more realistic manner. But rather than appearing on the big screen … More Punching Nazis just like Indiana Jones
As one grows older the years seem to get shorter, which may explain why I am already able to announce the arrival of my first publication for 2017! A while back I was contacted by the editors of Mobility in History – the yearbook of the International Association for the History of Transport, Traffic and … More New Publication: Reviewing the Cultural Histories and Geographies of Public Transport in Berlin
A compendium of research dedicated to subterranean spaces across the world, edited by Paul Dobraszczyk, Carlos López Galviz and Bradley Garrett, has just been published by Reaktion and I am proud to say I have contributed three essays to it! Entitled Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within, the book contains 80 essays written by a host … More New Publications: Global Undergrounds
I am really happy that my first publication of 2016 has been released. It is a development of a paper I presented in Rome back in 2012 and has been published as a contributory chapter in a book edited by Keir Reeves, Geoffrey R. Bird, Laura James, Birger Stichelbaut and Jean Bourgeois. The book, Battlefield … More New Publication: The memories & myths of WWII civilian suffering in the railways beneath London & Berlin
The digital recordings of the Graffiti Archaeologists! session from September’s EAA Glasgow conference have just been published and I thought I would re-post the recording of the paper I presented with a ‘virtual’ Lachland Macdowall here. This was the paper, entitled Buffing and Buffering: Street Art’s Accelerating Archaeologies, which we presented using Instagram in an … More Buffing and Buffering: Street Art’s Accelerating Archaeologies
A little over a year ago I presented a paper at the European Association of Urban History‘s conference in Lisbon and I am really excited to say that its outcome has just been published with open access in the Journal of Historical Geography (published online ahead of the October 2015 print issue). I have been … More New Publication: The Cultural Identities of Berlin’s S- & U-Bahn around 1989 in Journal of Historical Geography.
This evening I met up with an old friend in Kreuzberg and we decided to walk up to Schinkel’s Prussian National Monument for the Liberation Wars in Viktoriapark. From the top we discussed how the view might have looked at the time of the monument’s inauguration in 1821 and I told my friend about Neil … More The Dead Come: The Transcultural Activ(ist) Remembrance of the Victims of Fortress Europe.
A few months ago I presented a paper at a conference on Empty Spaces at the Institute of Historical Research in which I framed one of London’s most famous disused Underground Stations, the Aldwych Station as a ‘networked ruin’ and, at least until recently, a ‘dormant place’. In doing so I built on Mattais Qviström’s … More Recalling the Cold War Dormancy of Berlin’s Networked Ghost-Stations 25 Years On
Samuel Merrill 