Introducing: Brian Shaev
Brian Shaev recently joined the Institute for History as a lecturer in International Studies. He introduces himself.
In 2006, I graduated with a BA from New York University and moved to Avignon, France to teach as an English language assistant in two French high schools. From there I applied to graduate school and completed my MA (2009) and PhD (2014) in history at the University of Pittsburgh, where I also taught history as a teaching assistant and instructor. My dissertation is a transnational and comparative history of the German Social Democratic Party and French Socialist Party during the first decade of European integration in the postwar era, and I developed a subfield in French colonialism, decolonization, and the Algerian War. From March to July 2015 I was an International Research Fellow at the New Europe College in Bucharest, Romania. I moved to Gothenburg, Sweden in September 2015 to take a position as a postdoctoral researcher in economic history with the Centre for European Research at Gothenburg University (CERGU). After teaching the history of European integration to Swedish students in Gothenburg, I was hired by the Institute for History at Leiden University to teach and perform research (starting in the February semester of 2017) in the European Union and International Studies programs.
New Perspectives on European Integration History
In Gothenburg I began an ongoing research project on the transnational relations of socialist parties in the early European communities with a particular focus on (1) cartel and competition policies, (2) free movement of workers and migration, and (3) social policy. I am extending the geographic scope of my research in this project beyond France and Germany to the other founding members of the European communities: Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg, and, of course, the Netherlands. I am working on a book based on my dissertation that explores how concerns about security and domestic stability intersected with democratization projects to shape socialist and social-democratic views on domestic and international politics during the early Cold War. I am also co-authoring an edited volume on “A Hundred Years of Social Democracy and Cartels, Concentrations, and Competition in Europe” that investigates the evolving policies and ideas of social democratic parties on the regulation of market economies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As part of this project, I will be a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History from July to September 2017.
I am really thrilled to join such a vibrant intellectual climate in history and international studies at Leiden and I look forward to collaborating and interacting with students, staff, and faculty here in the years to come.