Heidi J. S. Tworek

Research Interests

Research

Dr. Heidi Tworek works on media, international organizations, and transatlantic relations. She is a member of the Science and Technology Studies program, the Language Science Initiative, and the Institute for European Studies at UBC. She is a visiting fellow at the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard University as well as a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. 

Heidi's book, News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 will be published in March 2019 by Harvard University Press. In March 2018, she published a co-edited volume, entitled Exorbitant Expectations: International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Heidi's many book chapters and journal articles have appeared in venues including Journal of Global History, Journal of Policy History, Business History Review, Journalism Studies, German History and Enterprise & Society. She is also the co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business, due to appear in 2019. Her further research interests include contemporary media and communications, German and transatlantic politics, the digital economy, the history of technology, legal history, digital history, the history of health, and higher education. 

Her writing has been published in English and German in major magazines and newspapers, including Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Politico, The Globe and Mail, Columbia Journalism Review, War on the Rocks, Wired, Nieman Journalism Lab, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Tagesspiegel, ZEIT, Internationale Politik, and The Conversation. Heidi also appears regularly on national radio and television in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. 

Heidi is committed to bringing a historical sensibility to policy discussions. She has briefed or advised officials and policymakers from multiple European and North American governments on media, democracy, and the digital economy. Funded by a Partnership Engage Grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, one of her projects in this area addresses how Canada can tackle harmful speech online.  

She manages the United Nations History Project website to provide materials for researching and teaching the history of international organizations. She also runs the UN History Project Twitter feed that is live tweeting the foundation of the UN, seventy years later. 

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. Her dissertation received the Herman E. Krooss Prize for best dissertation in business history. She previously held the position of Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies and Lecturer on History in the History Department at Harvard University. Heidi has held visiting fellowships at the Transatlantic Academy in Washington DC, Birkbeck, University of London and the Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam, Germany. She is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.