Prof. Annette Frances Timm

Dr. Timm's 2010 book (_The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin_) with Cambridge University Press, explores efforts to increase the birth rate for nationalistic purposes through eugenic marriage counselling and efforts to control venereal disease from WWI to the fall of communism.
 

Dr. Timm is co-author of _Gender, Sex and the Shaping of Modern Europe: A History from the French Revolution to the Present Day_ with Joshua Sanborn (first published in 2007, third edition published in 2022). The book presents a comparative view of the role of gender and sexuality in modern history through the lens of key ruptures in the political, cultural, social, military, and colonial history of Europe.

A current book project (_Lebensborn: Myth, Memory and the Sexualization of the Nazi Past_) will explore the history of a program initiated by Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, to provide maternity homes for women considered racially valuable by the regime. The book investigates the history of the homes, which were spread across Nazi-occupied Europe, along with the myths that circulated about them in the post-WWII period, including fictionalized and sensationalized accounts in popular culture.

Together with German, American, and Dutch researchers, Dr. Timm is engaged in an ongoing collaborative exhibition project that explores the resonance of German sexology in public discourses about sex, sexuality, and treatment options for trans individuals in Europe and North America. This collaboration produced two exhibitions: PopSex!, at the Alberta College of Art + Design in 2011; and TransTrans, at the University of Calgary's Nickle Galleries in 2016 and at the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) in Berlin in 2019-20. TransTrans will be restaged in a new form at the Amerikahaus in Munich in March 2022. We have documented our research in an edited volume (_Not Straight from Germany: Sexual Publics and Sexual Citizenship since Magnus Hirschfeld_) and a jointly authored book outlining our research into the exchanges between doctors and trans individuals in Germany, the United States, and the Netherlands (_Others of My Kind: Transatlantic Transgender Histories_, UCalgary Press, 2021). Our curatorial focus is on the exploration of methods to communicate historical knowledge to the public through collaboration with museums and artists.

Dr. Timm is the editor of _Ka-Tzetnik: Reading the First Holocaust Novelist in Israel and Beyond_ (Bloomsbury, 2017). In January 2017, she co-taught the Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar at the Mandel Center of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which brought together junior faculty members from across the continent to discuss methods of teaching the Holocaust. The seminar focused on gender and sexual violence in the killing fields and concentration camps, a subject that will occupy a another strand of research interest in the coming years. She also edited and provided the introduction for the special issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality on “Transgressive Sex, Love and Violence in WWII Germany and Britain" (26/3, 2017). She is particularly interested in questions about the use of survivor testimony about violent and traumatic experiences in scholarly research and teaching.

A new project, just in development, will explore how the various WWII belligerents attempted to influence both domestic public opinion and the actions of enemy soldiers through the dissemination of leaflets, pamphlets, film, and radio transmissions. I will compare both direct (factual) information campaigns and surreptitious (often known as black propaganda) efforts to encourage enemy desertion by spreading targeted misinformation. Although the outlines of the project are still to be determined, it will likely concentrate on the following countries: Germany, the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands.