Dr. Andrew Tompkins

since 2020
DAAD Research Fellow at the University of Erfurt and Uniwersytet Wrocławski. Project: “Working the Border: Policing Labour along the Polish-East German Border, 1980-1989”

since 2016
Lecturer at the University of Sheffield

2013 – 2016
Humboldt Post-Doc Fellow, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

2012 – 2013
Scholarship Lecturer in History at Balliol College, University of Oxford

2008 – 2012
Doctorate (DPhil) at the University of Oxford

2007 – 2008
Study of History (M.A.) at the University of Chicago

2004 – 2005
Studied Political Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A.), at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) and at the Humboldt University of Berlin

Working the Border: Policing Labour along the Polish-East German Border, 1980-1989

Despite East Germany's unilateral closure of its border with Poland in 1980, thousands of Polish commuters continued to cross over daily for work in GDR factories throughout the decade. For these mostly female workers, GDR jobs meant higher wages, privileged mobility, and access to scarce goods-which might be resold on the unofficial market in Poland. "Working the Border" will consider their transnational activity as an instance of Europeanization from below, examining the practices of commuters and border police in the region of Görlitz/Zgorzelec during the 1980s to show how Eastern Europeans incorporated border-crossing into daily life prior to EU accession, even under highly restrictive conditions in the final decade of state socialism.

• Environmental History
• Transnational History
• Borders, Border Regions
• Contemporary European History (France, Germany, Poland)
• Social Movements

Towards a 'Europe of Struggles'? Three Visions of Europe in the Early Anti-Nuclear Energy Movement, 1975-79, in: Eric Bussière et al. (eds.), The Environment and the European Public Sphere. Perceptions, Actors, Policies, Cambridge 2020, pp. 122-144.

Binding the Nation, Bounding the State. Germany and its Borders, in: German History 37 (2019), pp. 77-100.

Better Active than Radioactive! Anti-Nuclear Protest in 1970s France and West Germany, Oxford 2016.

Grassroots Transnationalism(s). Franco-German Opposition to Nuclear Energy in the 1970s, in: Contemporary European History 25 (2016), pp. 117-142.

The Transnational in the Local. The Larzac Plateau as a Site of Transnational Activism since 1970 (together with Robert Gildea), in: Journal of Contemporary History 50 (2015), pp. 581-605.