Briana J. Smith, PhD
I am an Associate Director of Studies and Lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in History & Literature at Harvard and a historian of modern Europe. My book, Free Berlin: Art, Urban Politics, and Everyday Life, appeared with MIT Press in fall 2022. Free Berlin examines spontaneous art actions, performances, and installations staged in galleries, apartments, private art spaces, and city streets across Berlin from the late Cold War period to the present. It reveals the emergence of an egalitarian and socially engaged visual culture in the divided city that elevated art and creativity as an essential component of civic life. Free Berlin argues that this visual culture was equally formative of the durable tradition of participation, civic engagement, and lively urban agitation in the contemporary city.
My new book project, DIY Internet: European Cybercultures, 1980-2000 , introduces a network of computer hackers, new media artists, and self-described “net critics” from Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, who sought to decentralize and democratize digital technology at the end of the twentieth-century. Through do-it-yourself electronic bulletin boards, participatory media art projects, and neighborhood computer clubs, this digital avant-garde cultivated a grassroots-based internet for all that distinguished a European alternative to the techno-libertarianism of Silicon Valley.
I have also published articles in the American Historical Review and Contemporary European History.
My teaching and research interests include twentieth century Europe, modern Germany, the global Cold War, art and politics, media and technology in society, digital culture, and urban studies.
In my free time, I like to hike in any forest I can find and make amateur recordings on GarageBand.
Please contact me at bjsmith (at) fas.harvard.edu