Tuesday, January 29, 2019 12PM
Bunche 6275
European Colloquium Speaker Series
Roii Ball – “Indebted Settlement : Rural Credit, National Segregation, and ‘Internal Colonization’ in the German-Polish Borderlands before the First World War”
Roii Ball – PhD candidate, UCLA
Roii Ball is a sixth year graduate student at the UCLA History Department. He earned a BA in history from Tel-Aviv University in 2012 and advanced to PhD candidacy in 2016. He previously held research fellowships at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and at the University of Cologne. His dissertation explores the social history of an agrarian settlement project that was undertaken by the Prussian-German imperial nation state between the years 1886-1914. This ‘internal colonization’ project sought to settle Germans in the German-Polish borderlands of the empire, replacing Poles with Germans and latifundia estates with medium-sized family farms. The dissertation revolves around different aspects of what was in fact a deep social transformation: the on-going formation of a settler society in the provinces of Poznania and West Prussia on the Russian border. In his dissertation, Ball studies the roles played by rural credit, children in poverty, planning and architecture, and migration, in this history of nationalism, empire, and settler-colonialism in the heart of Europe.
Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to Ryan Hilliard (rhilliard@ucla.edu) by Tuesday, January 22, 2019 if you plan to attend and include any dietary restrictions.
