About

Jennifer Allen is an associate professor of history at Yale University and serves as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History. She is a historian specializing in modern German history with a focus on late twentieth-century cultural practices. Her research explores themes such as grassroots activism, the politics of space, and the cultural history of modern Europe, particularly after the Cold War. Her first book, 'Sustainable Utopias: The Art and Politics of Hope in Germany' (forthcoming from Harvard University Press), examines Germany’s efforts to revitalize the concept of utopia following the collapse of Europe's violent utopian social engineering projects at the end of the twentieth century. The book demonstrates that German interest in radical societal alternatives persisted through the 1980s and 1990s, with grassroots groups engaging in cultural projects to resist political disenfranchisement and social alienation, thereby reclaiming utopian hope. Allen's work also includes a notable article on how Germany’s grassroots commemorative practices have influenced international communities. Her second book project, 'Insurance Against Total Destruction: A Postwar History of German Plans to Save the World,' analyzes postwar German efforts to archive resources for cultural and environmental reconstruction after total catastrophe. This project investigates how East and West Germany responded to threats of nuclear and environmental destruction, with a focus on preserving cultural heritage and biodiversity, and extends its analysis to global contexts such as Ethiopia, Costa Rica, and Arctic regions. Allen’s scholarship integrates perspectives from future studies, environmentalism, decolonization, and the cultural implications of actuarial science, providing insights into Cold War-era efforts to preserve civilization’s self-conception.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Gastroenterology
• Psychiatry
• Surgery

Selected publications

• An anti-cancer cell therapy platform utilizing ex vivo physiologic dendritic cells expressing mRNA-encoded antigens and immune checkpoint blockers

  Research Square · 2025-05-30

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Free Berlin: Art, Urban Politics, and Everyday Life By Briana J. Smith. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT Press, 2022. Pp. 328. Cloth $29.95. ISBN: 978-0262047197.

  Central European History · 2024-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 4. A Sustainable Cultural Politics

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2022-03-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• 6. A Sustainable Aesthetics

  Harvard University Press eBooks · 2022-03-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Tofacitinib for Biologic-Experienced Hospitalized Patients With Acute Severe Ulcerative Colitis: A Retrospective Case-Control Study

  Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology · 2021 · 124 citations

  • Medicine
  • Internal medicine
  • Gastroenterology
  DOI

• The Unexpectedness of Events: GDR-Born Academics on Becoming Historians after 1989–1990

  Central European History · 2020-09-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Thirty years ago, on October 3, 1990, two German states became one. The academy, however, had a long way to go before it could begin to make a similar claim. The relatively swift dismantling of the “Wall on the ground” did not occasion an equally swift dismantling of the so-called “Wall in the head,” especially within the historical field in the new Federal Republic. Young scholars from the “Workers’ and Peasants’ State” launched their careers as professional historians in a profoundly different political and social context than the one into which they had been socialized. Few would describe this new academic constellation as “unified.” This forum developed, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the events of 1989–1990, as an attempt to understand the ways that having lived through a world-historical transition has impacted the work of historians from the former German Democratic Republic. It explores the ways these scholars’ experiences—lived experiences of a necessarily transnational kind of history—have shaped their appreciation of the project of history: its form, its purpose, its promises, and its limits. It considers the ways the academy in the new Federal Republic did and did not make room for these scholars and their historiographical perspectives. It reflects on the power of culture, politics, and memory on conceptualizations of the past. To engage with these themes, Central European History 's editor invited Jennifer Allen (Yale University) to convene a forum. She invited Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (University of California, Berkeley), Christina Morina (Universität Bielefeld), and Patrice Poutrus (Universität Erfurt) to participate.

  PublisherDOI

• Mental Health Costs of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases

  Inflammatory Bowel Diseases · 2020 · 52 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Medicine
  • Internal medicine
  • Psychiatry

  BACKGROUND: Mental health diagnoses (MHDs) were identified as significant drivers of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)-related costs in an analysis titled "Cost of Care Initiative" supported by the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation. In this subanalysis, we sought to characterize and compare IBD patients with and without MHDs based on insurance claims data in terms of demographic traits, medical utilization, and annualized costs of care. METHODS: We analyzed the Optum Research Database of administrative claims from years 2007 to 2016 representing commercially insured and Medicare Advantage insured IBD patients in the United States. Inflammatory bowel disease patients with and without an MHD were compared in terms of demographics (age, gender, race), insurance type, IBD-related medical utilization (ambulatory visits, emergency department [ED] visits, and inpatient hospitalizations), and total IBD-related costs. Only patients with costs >$0 in each of the utilization categories were included in the cost estimates. RESULTS: Of the total IBD study cohort of 52,782 patients representing 179,314 person-years of data, 22,483 (42.6%) patients had at least 1 MHD coded in their claims data with a total of 46,510 person-years in which a patient had a coded MHD. The most commonly coded diagnostic categories were depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, adjustment disorders, substance use disorders, and bipolar and related disorders. Compared with patients without an MHD, a significantly greater percentage of IBD patients with MHDs were female (61.59% vs 48.63%), older than 75 years of age (9.59% vs 6.32%), white (73.80% vs 70.17%), and significantly less likely to be younger than 25 years of age (9.18% vs 11.39%) compared with those without mental illness (P < 0.001). Patients with MHDs had significantly more ED visits (14.34% vs 7.62%, P < 0.001) and inpatient stays (19.65% vs 8.63%, P < 0.001) compared with those without an MHD. Concomitantly, patients with MHDs had significantly higher ED costs ($970 vs $754, P < 0.001) and inpatient costs ($39,205 vs $29,550, P < 0.001) compared with IBD patients without MHDs. Patients with MHDs also had significantly higher total annual IBD-related surgical costs ($55,693 vs $40,486, P < 0.001) and nonsurgical costs (medical and pharmacy) ($17,220 vs $11,073, P < 0.001), and paid a larger portion of the total out-of-pocket cost for IBD services ($1017 vs $905, P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: Patients whose claims data contained both IBD-related and MHD-related diagnoses generated significantly higher costs compared with IBD patients without an MHD diagnosis. Based on these data, we speculate that health care costs might be reduced and the course of patients IBD might be improved if the IBD-treating provider recognized this link and implemented effective behavioral health screening and intervention as soon as an MHD was suspected during management of IBD patients. Studies investigating best screening and intervention strategies for MHDs are needed.

  DOI

• CCC volume 53 issue 4 Cover and Back matter

  Central European History · 2020-12-01

  paratextOpen access

  An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. As you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Utopia and Dissent in West Germany: The Resurgence of the Politics of Everyday Life in the Long 1960s

  German History · 2020-03-02

  article1st authorCorresponding

  For the force of their convictions that they could remake society in revolutionary ways, activists of the 1960s have continued to pique the curiosity of scholars. Their unexpected optimism invites us to question its origins. Their radicalism invites us to analyse their methods. And after many of their efforts fizzled out unspectacularly, those collapses invite us to investigate their legacies. The 50th anniversary of 1968 prompted a wave of renewed interest in all of these themes. Mia Lee’s Utopia and Dissent in West Germany fits under this umbrella. Lee sets out to establish that West German artists played a central role in efforts to challenge the postwar order. She highlights a collection of individuals and organizations that lamented what they saw as society’s prophylactic separation of labour and ‘life’, under the banner of which they included creative enterprises like art. This compartmentalization of art—also represented variously as play, leisure, liberation, sex, and provocation—had the unwanted effect of stripping society of its ability to imagine a superlative future, they claimed. Undoing that compartmentalization by reintegrating art back into society would enable the pursuit of a better world. Art, after all, offered ‘the portal to a future utopia’ (p. 9).

  PublisherDOI

• Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories

  German History · 2019-05-28 · 190 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Megan A. Adams

  Ross University School of Medicine

  47 shared

• John E. Morley

  Imperial College London

  23 shared

• Allen S. Levine

  22 shared

• Timothy R. Church

  University of Minnesota

  20 shared

• Michael L. Kochman

  20 shared

• Jeffrey L. Tokar

  18 shared

• Samuel B. Ho

  Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences

  16 shared

• Michael J. O’Brien

  University Medical Center

  16 shared

Awards & honors

• German Academic Exchange Service
• Volkswagen Foundation
• Mellon Foundation
• Institute for Contemporary History in Munich
• American Academy in Berlin