Dr. Mario Bianchini is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University of Berlin, a Lecturer of History at the Barenboim-Said Akademie, and the principal researcher for East Germany for the “Economic Collectivism: Old and New” project at the University of Vienna.

Mario earned his PhD in the History and Sociology of Technology and Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology,  where his dissertation focused on the German Democratic Republic’s efforts to invent their own national identity around the promise of a socialist “scientific-technological revolution.” His work has been published in several journals and books, including German Studies Review (2020), the Yearbook for Historical Communism Research (2021), and as a book chapter in The Economic Drivers of State Socialism in early 2024. His work has also been supported by several fellowships and grants, including a Fulbright research fellowship, two German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) grants, and a Linda Hall Library dissertation fellowship. He also holds a Bachelor’s of Arts from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, where he focused on comparative post-war guilt in East and West Germany.

He, along with co-writer Matthew Thomas, has also written a complete, 10 episode television series on the Iran/Contra affair and the resulting massacres in El Salvador titled “Years of Lead.”