Marcel Thomas is Departmental Lecturer in Twentieth-Century European History at St Antony’s College. He completed his PhD at the University of Bristol in 2017. His thesis, Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in the Divided Germany, is the first comparative study of how East and West German villagers experienced and navigated social change in their localities in the postwar era. His research interests include the history of the divided Germany, space and place, memory and oral history. He has previously published in the Journal of Urban History and the European Review of History, and he is the co-editor of The GDR Today: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to East German History, Memory and Culture (2018).