In her latest book, Dr. Heidi Tworek reminds us that while the control of information may seem as if it is something new, brought on by the likes of Google and Facebook today, this is not the case at all. In her wide-ranging talk, Dr. Tworek will discuss how, across two devastating wars and three different political regimes, Germany attempted and nearly succeeded in creating a powerful communication empire…along the way, and shrewdly in the case of Nazi Germany, using the innovation of wireless technology to further increase its global reach. As Dr. Tworek will also discuss, this desire to master the airwaves of global propaganda is not just a history lesson about Germany. Indeed, the generation and control of news, real and fake, has become an international obsession with many parallels to what we are witnessing today.

Dr. Heidi Tworek is an associate professor of international history and public policy at the University of British Columbia and a member of the Science and Technology Studies program, the Language Science Initiative, and the Institute for European Studies at UBC. Heidi is also a visiting fellow at the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States plus the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. Her writing has been published in English and German in major magazines and newspapers at home and internationally and Heidi appears regularly on national radio and television in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. She received her BA (Hons) in Modern and Medieval Languages with a double first from Cambridge University and earned her MA and PhD in History from Harvard University.