“Germans from Russia in South America: New Research Frontiers”

“Germans from Russia in South America: New Research Frontiers”
Presented By: Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz
Date: Saturday, April 26 at 10 a.m.

Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz, associate history professor at Northwestern Oklahoma State University in Alva, will be at the Sod House Museum Saturday, April 26 at 10 a.m. to present an overview and presentation on “Germans from Russia in South America: New Research Frontiers.” Schmaltz serves as scriptwriter and historical consultant for the upcoming Fargo, North Dakota-based Prairie Public Broadcasting documentary film on the German-Russian experience in South America. For this project, he traveled to Argentina with producers and film crew in October 2013. He will present a brief history of the migrations, settlement patterns, and contributions of German-Russians in Argentina and Brazil beginning in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, he will reflect on more recent developments affecting South America’s German-Russians and how this documentary project and other current outreach efforts taking place worldwide among them appear to be intimately connected with broader and quite dramatic early twenty-first-century technological and research trends.
The film will premiere in summer 2015.

Schmaltz teaches modern European and world history, producing various publications and translations for the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR) in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) in Bismarck, North Dakota, and the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection at the North Dakota State University (GRHC NDSU) Libraries in Fargo. Other work has appeared either online or in newsletters, local newspapers, interdisciplinary journals such as “Ethnic and Racial Studies,” “Holocaust and Genocide Studies,” “Journal of Genocide Research,” “Nationalities Papers,” and “Oklahoma Politics,” as well as major international anthologies on the Holocaust by Berghahn Books and K. G. Saur Verlag. His most recent articles have appeared in the “Society for German American Studies Yearbook” from the University of Kansas at Lawrence, and the online journal of the Eurasian Studies Society of the United Kingdom.

Schmaltz serves as co-executive director of the endowed Northwestern Oklahoma State University Institute for Citizenship Studies and as senior editor of its journal “Civitas.” He is also GRHS “Heritage Review” editor, AHSGR journal editorial board member, and member of the Board of Academic Advisors at the Center for Volga German Studies at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. In recent years, he also presented an academic paper in German for a panel hosted by the German Cultural Forum of Eastern Europe in Potsdam, Germany, took an extensive tour of the former German settlements near Odessa, Ukraine, and spoke at the Workshop on the German Diaspora in Eastern and Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union sponsored by the School of Government and International Affairs at Durham University in England.

The Sod House Museum is operated by the Oklahoma Historical Society and located southeast of Aline on State Highway 8. The museum is open Tues. – Sat. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. with admission. For more information contact Renee Trindle at 580-463-2441 or email sodhouse@okhistory.org.