Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Duration of stay: June 2023

Contact: witty@berkeley.edu

Jason Wittenberg is Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley. He is a specialist in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet region, working on religion and politics, and ethnic conflict, using approaches including quantitative analysis and electoral analysis. His current project, which he will be developing while in Regensburg in June 2023, explores historical legacies, asking: What are historical legacies? How they should be identified and measured? By what mechanisms are they transmitted?

His publications include the book Intimate Violence: Anti-Jewish Pogroms on the Eve of the Holocaust (with Jeffrey S. Kopstein; Cornell University Press, 2018) and the articles Dead but Not Gone: Legacies of Imperialism, Authoritarianism, and Communism (with Alberto Simpser and Dan Slater), Annual Review of Political  (2018) and Beyond Dictatorship and Democracy: Rethinking National Minority Inclusion and Regime Type in Interwar Eastern Europe. (with Jeffrey S. Kopstein), Comparative Political Studies, (2010).

Find out more about his research and CV here: http://witty.berkeley.edu/

During his time in Regensburg, apart from being open to consultations and discussing collaborations with Berkeley, he will give a talk at 14:15 on 15 June in Room 319 at the Altes Finanzamt (Landshuter Str. 4) on Logics of Historical Persistence. This talk, part of the ScienceCampus and Graduate School Research Colloquium, addresses how social scientists discuss and assert persistence of social phenomena even in the presence of change. It identifies different logics of persistence, each of which specifies a different set of criteria for distinguishing between identity-preserving and identity-destroying change. The paper draws on examples from the United States, Eastern Europe, and Germany.

Photo: https://polisci.berkeley.edu/people/person/jason-wittenberg