Benjamin Martin

An American-born and trained historian of twentieth-century Europe, I am senior lecturer (associate professor) in Uppsala's Department of History of Science and Ideas. My current research, financed by the Swedish Research Council, uses digital text analysis to explore the development of "international ideas" at UNESCO, 1945-2015.

Earlier work includes the book The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture, published by Harvard in 2016.

More on me and my work at: benjamingmartin.com

A graduate of Columbia University (PhD, 2006), Benjamin Martin is a historian of twentieth-century international cultural relations. He is the author of The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016), a study of how the German-Italian Axis sought to create a "New Order" in European cultural life in the late 1930s and during WWII. His current research, pursued in close collaboration with Humlab at Umeå University, uses methods from the digital humanities to explore the political and intellectual history of the role of culture in international relations: first in a project exploring the history of bilateral cultural agreements, and now in a project on the development of "international ideas" at UNESCO.

At Uppsala University, Martin is senior lecturer (associate professor) in the Department of History of Science and Ideas, where he teaches several courses in intellectual and cultural history, including co-teaching a course on narrative and the uses of history. From 2010 to early 2017 he was director of the Euroculture Program, an Erasmus Mundus MA program in European studies, where he led the planning of Euroculture’s 2014 summer Intensive Program, which linked European studies to the environmental humanities through a week-long program on “How a New Climate is Changing the Old World.” Martin was likewise involved in the undergraduate Liberal Arts Program at Uppsala’s Campus Gotland, where he helped develop (and co-taught) the course "Människan och miljön" ("Humans and the environment").

Martin has presented on culture and politics in non-academic contexts, including presentations on Italian futurism at SFMOMA, on fascism and intellectuals at the Bard Music Festival, and in historical presentations for the cast and crew of Uppsala Stadsteater's productions of Sound of Music (2012) and Cabaret (2014), for which he also wrote program notes.

Prior to coming to Uppsala, Martin was Assistant Professor of History at San Francisco State University from 2008 to 2010, where he taught on the political and cultural history of twentieth-century Europe.

Please visit also www.benjamingmartin.com. Some publications and papers are available at Ben Martin’s page at academia.edu.

My current research, financed by the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences, explores how European states' cultural treaties helped create a global concept of culture in the twentieth century.

For more on this and other ongoing projects please visit benjamingmartin.com