Greg Castillo returns from a year of research in Germany and England to work as a member of the Townsend Fellows Group on a dissertation entitled Building Stalin’s Germany: Ideology, Identity, and Reconstruction in the German Democratic Republic, 1946-1956. The study explores the use of postwar reconstruction as a vehicle for societal and urban transformation. In examining the institutions through which architects, construction laborers, and residents of new housing were recast in a Soviet mold, as well as the use of reformed urban settings as a supporting infrastructure of scripted roles assigned to East Germany’s proletariat and intelligensia, the project has been conceived as a “cultural archaeology” that “unearths” the G.D.R.’s campaign to build “real and existing socialism.”