Katrin Schreiter is Senior Lecturer in German and History and a joint appointment in the Departments of Languages, Literatures & Cultures and History. She studied History, Political Science, and North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, where she was awarded a postgraduate fellowship for the United States. During her tenure at the Ohio State University, Katrin completed an MA in Diplomatic History in 2005. She then went on to earn a PhD in Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. Before joining King’s College London in 2013, she taught twentieth-century history at the University of Pennsylvania and in the Department of European Cultural History at the Universität Augsburg. Katrin is a Fellow at the Center for Sports and Business, Stockholm School of Economics, and was a visiting scholar at the Department of Management at Università Ca' Foscari Venice in the spring of 2024.

Research interests and PhD supervision 

• 20th-century Central and Eastern European history
• Cold War
• Cultural approaches to economic and business history
• Consumption and everyday life
• Material culture studies

Katrin’s main research lies in the field of 20th-century German history. One area of focus has been the interplay of economics and culture during the Cold War, and how these arenas are connected to the politics of German and European diplomacy through negotiations over the East German - West German relationship. She employs material culture methodology as an anchor for identity discourses on national, regional, and individual levels. Related publications have included analysis of the two German states’ nation branding efforts as well as an examination of East German firm identity under the institutional pressures of communism. Currently, Katrin is working on two projects that expand her scope of inquiry beyond Germany. One addresses the organisational challenges the collapse of the Habsburg and Tsarist empires after World War I posed to private enterprise in East Central Europe. She is working with an international research group on tracing transnational activities in the enamelling industry. The second project is the digital humanities project "Thinglines" in cooperation with colleagues at King's, UNC Chapel Hill (USA) and Curtin University (Australia). The project provides a platform for recovering the material heritage of marginalised diasporic communities and is interested in following the stories and meanings connected to everyday objects.

Katrin welcomes applications for PhD topics related to any of her research interests.

Teaching

Katrin Schreiter has taught modules ranging from international history to modern European history with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. Her modules cover global topics such as the Cold War or industrialisation, building on her expertise in cultural and business history. In her teaching, she offers different theoretical approaches and historical methods, including class, gender, race, visual and material culture, to allow students to critically engage with historical evidence and to gain a better understanding of the past and its influence on the present.

Expertise and public engagement

'In collaboration with the German Historical Institute London, Katrin Schreiter developed a prize-winning public engagement project on the topic of migrants’ material traces in 2015. “Things We Keep: Curators of Our Own History” used material culture and oral history methodologies to curate an exhibition and create an online archive: www.thingswekeep.org. Katrin has given numerous media interviews including BBC World Service, RBB Kulturradio and the Deutsche Presse Agentur. She welcomes media requests about postwar German history and current political culture. Katrin has featured in several podcasts and videos about the German past:

• Video: The Telephone Exchange Phrasebook, Glimpses of German History series, German History Society, 2023.
• Podcast: The Berlin Wall, Conflict of Interest series, Imperial War Museum, London, 2022.

Selected publications

• K. Schreiter, Designing one nation: The politics of economic culture and trade in divided Germany. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
• E. Carter, J. Palmowski, and K. Schreiter, eds. German division as shared experience: Interdisciplinary perspectives on the postwar everyday. New York/London: Berghahn Books, 2019. 
• K. Schreiter and D. Ravasi. "Institutional pressures and organizational identity: The case of Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau in the GDR and beyond, 1945-1996." Business History Review 92, 3/2018, 453-481.
• K. Schreiter, "Revisiting Morale under the Bombs: The Gender of Affect in Darmstadt, 1942-1945." Central European History 50, Issue 3/2017, pp. 347-374. DOI: 10.1017/S0008938917000632.
• P. Aversa, K. Schreiter, and F. Guerrini. “The birth of a business icon through cultural branding: Ferrari and the Prancing Horse, 1923–1947.” Enterprise & Society 24, Issue 1/2023, pp. 28–58. DOI: 10.1017/eso.2021.22.