Part II: The World Wars of Disinformation and Demagoguery, Then and Now’
Tuesday, December 2, 202512:30 - 2:00 pm ET (US)
Zoom Webinar
About the Event
Carolin Lange, Jamie McSpadden, and Thomas Weber discuss Weber’s contention that we should turn to the interwar years for inspiration to strengthen our democracy, as we are experiencing once again a World War of Disinformation and Demagoguery, akin to the one of the interwar years.
About the Speakers
Carolin Lange is a researcher at the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg and project leader of the project “After They Left – Private Perceptions of the Holocaust.” As an expert on Nazi-looted art, she is academic co-director for Provenance Research Studies at the Université de Neuchatel in Switzerland. Among other positions, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck-Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and a DAAD postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington. In 2019, she was a Mandel Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
James McSpadden is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at the University of Nevada, Reno, and he is currently the Jean Sanford Distinguished Professor of the Humanities (2024-2026) in the Core Humanities Program. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University, an M.A. in Dutch Studies from Leiden University, and a B.A. in German Studies from Yale.
His first book A Continent of Colleagues: Backroom Politics and Interwar Democracy (University of Toronto Press, 2025) comparatively explores the private lives of politicians and politics behind the scenes in the Europe of the 1920s and 1930s when democracy was besieged by radical political forces. McSpadden’s work has been featured in German History, Central European History, and elsewhere and his research has been supported by the American Historical Association, the American Council on Germany, the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, among others.
Thomas Weber is Professor of History and International Affairs as well as the founding Director of the Centre of Global Security and Governance at the University of Aberdeen. He also is a Visiting Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; an Associate Fellow of the Center for Advanced Security, Strategic and Integration Studies at the University of Bonn; a Senior Associate of the Centre for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Munk School for Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto; and a Member of the Security History Network at Utrecht University. His expertise lies in European, international, and global political history from the 19th century to the present.
A native of Breckerfeld in Westphalia, he earned his DPhil from the University of Oxford. He also has taught or has held fellowships at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Chicago, and the University of Glasgow.
Read more about Thomas Weber here.