Claudia Stein's Conversations

Kathy Stuart is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on the history of criminal justice, deviance, marginality and gender in early modern Germany. Her first book, Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge UP, 1999), received the biennial Hans Rosenberg Book Prize in 2001. Defiled Trades appeared in German translation in 2008 as Unehrliche Berufe : Status Und Stigmata in Der Frühen Neuzeit Am Beispiel Augsburgs. Her article “Suicide by Proxy: The Unintended Consequences of Public Executions in eighteenth-century Germany,” Central European History, 41 (2008), was awarded the biennial Annelise Thimme Article Prize in 2010. Her second book, Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation appeared with Palgrave Macmillan in July 2023. Since 2015 she has collaborated as historical advisor with Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala on their feature film Des Teufel’s Bad (The Devil’s Bath), that premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, the Berlinale. Cinematographer Martin Gschlacht was awarded a Silver Bear for “outstanding artistic contribution.”

Fred Reid was born in Glasgow in 1935. He went blind at the age of 14 and continued his schooling at the Edinburgh School of the Blind. In 1958 he went on to study law and history at Edinburgh University. Discovering that he loved history more than the law, he went to Oxford Queen’s college to obtain a doctorate in history 1967. He joined the History Department at the Warwick University in 1967, two years after it was founded in 1965, and retired in 1997. Since his youth, Fred has also been a fearless spokesmen and activist for the concerns of the blind community in Britain. He served as the President of the National Federation of the Blind & and Partially Sighted (1972-1975). As a trustee, he was heavily involved in the Royal National Institute of the Blind (RNIB) from 1974-1987; 1999-2006). He was involved in the formation of the Association of Blind and Partially Sighted Teachers and Students.Selected works:- Keir Hardy: The making of a socialist (Crome Helm, 1978)- Thomas Hardy and History (Basingstoke, 2017)- Panopticum: A Novel (unpublished 2006, available @ https://www.fredreid.co.uk/toc.html)