An Illinois Sampler presents personal accounts from faculty members at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other contributors about their research and how it enriches and energizes their teaching. Contributors from the humanities, engineering, social and natural sciences, and other disciplines explore how ideas, methods, and materials merge to lead their students down life-changing paths to creativity, discovery, and solutions. Faculty introduce their classes to work conducted from the Illinois prairie to Caribbean coral reefs to African farms, and from densely populated cities to dense computer coding. In so doing they generate an atmosphere where research, teaching, and learning thrive inside a feedback loop of education across disciplines.

Aimed at alumni and prospective students interested in the university's ongoing mission, as well as current faculty and students wishing to stay up to date on the work being done around them, An Illinois Sampler showcases the best, the most ambitious, and the most effective teaching practices developed and nurtured at one of the world's premier research universities.

Contributors are Nancy Abelmann, Flavia C. D. Andrade, Jayadev Athreya, Betty Jo Barrett, Thomas J. Bassett, Hugh Bishop, Antoinette Burton, Lauren A. Denofrio-Corrales, Lizanne DeStefano, Karen Flynn, Bruce W. Fouke, Rebecca Ginsburg, Julie Jordan Gunn, Geoffrey Herman, Laurie Johnson, Kyle T. Mays, Rebecca Nettl-Fiol, Audrey Petty, Anke Pinkert, Raymond Price, Luisa-Maria Rosu, D. Fairchild Ruggles, Carol Spindel, Mark D. Steinberg, William Sullivan, Richard I. Tapping, Bradley Tober, Agniezska Tuszynska, Bryan Wilcox, Kate Williams, Mary-Ann Winkelmes, and Yi Lu.

This account of the “laboratory of radical democracy” in the months before East Germany’s absorption in the West challenges memories of Germany’s reunification.

For many, 1989 is an iconic date, one we associate with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. The year prompts some to rue the defeat of socialism in the East, while others celebrate a victory for democracy and capitalism in the reunified Germany. Remembering 1989 focuses on a largely forgotten “interregnum”: the months between the outbreak of protests in the German Democratic Republic in 1989 and its absorption by the West in 1990. Anke Pinkert, who herself participated in those protests, recalls these months as a volatile but joyous “laboratory of radical democracy,” and tells the story of how and why this “time out of joint” has been erased from Germany’s national memory.

Remembering 1989 argues that in order to truly understand Germany’s historic transformation, we must revisit protesters’ actions across a wide range of minor, vernacular, and often transient sources. Drawing on rich archives including videotapes of untelevised protests, illegally printed petitions by Church leaders, audio recordings of dissident meetings, and interview footage with military troops, Pinkert opens the discarded history of East European social uprisings to new interpretations and imagines alternatives to Germany’s neoliberal status quo. The result is a vivid, unexpected contribution to memory studies and European history.