News from SUNY Cortland

For more information contact: Jean Palmer, 607-753-2232

Historian To Discuss Communism And The Environment In East Germany

April 16 Talk Continues College's 'Environment And Culture' Series

CORTLAND, NY (04/07/2008; 0854)(readMedia)-- Historian Scott Moranda, whose research has focused on European social and cultural history since 1851, will speak on Wednesday, April 16, at SUNY Cortland.

Moranda, an assistant professor of history at SUNY Cortland, will begin his talk on “The Green and the Red: The East German Environment Under Communism” at 4:30 p.m. in Cornish Hall, Room D-304. A reception in the Brooks Museum, located in Cornish Hall, Room D-312, will precede the talk.

The lecture, which continues the yearlong Brooks Museum Lecture Series on “Culture and the Environment,” is free and open to the public. All lectures in the series take place on Wednesdays.

Moranda, who joined the College in 2005, has concentrated his research on Germany from the Peace of Westphalia and French history from 1600. His interests include landscape and environment, landscape and identity, American environmental history, the history of ecology and social forestry.

“I will be exploring the environmental consequences of communism in East Germany during the Cold War,” Moranda said. “Did Marxism – its fundamental ideas and goals – lead to an ecological disaster, or was it the historically-specific economic choices made by East German party leaders during a time of Cold War competition with a liberal democratic West German neighbor?”

Last March, Moranda was invited to participate in a transnational workshop hosted by the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., on the theme “The Cold War and the Environment.”

Moranda earned his bachelor’s degree in history from Carleton College in Minnesota and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The lecture series is sponsored by the College’s Auxiliary Services Corporation (ASC). For more information, contact Sharon Steadman, associate professor of anthropology, at (607) 753-2308.

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