Writing in the Social Sciences

Briana J. Smith is an Associate Director of Studies and Lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University. Her book, Free Berlin: Art, Urban Politics, and Everyday Life, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press in September 2022, recovers a largely forgotten world of experimental artists and their outsized effect on grassroots politics in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century Berlin. The work examines spontaneous art actions, performances, and installations staged in galleries, apartments, private art spaces, and city streets across Berlin, connecting artistic projects to the political worlds of divided Berlin, the fall of communism, and German re-unification. A new research project, "DIY Internet: European Digital Cultures 1980-2000," examines how a network of western European hackers, punks, and artists steered the internet toward egalitarian and non-commercial ends in the late twentieth century. Her research was supported by the German Academic Exchange Service, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the Central European History Society, and the University of Iowa. She earned a PhD in history from the University of Iowa in 2017.