Department Faculty

"An historian of both modern Europe and the human sciences, I am particularly interested in how European society in general – and Germany in particular – grappled with the questions and problems accompanying modernity. My research has largely focused on the nature of power and the relationship between politics, science, and medicine in 20th century Germany. Currently, I am finishing a book that examines the politiics and science of criminal deviance in Nazi, East, and West Germany. In addition, I am editing a book and writing articles on the history of the self, crime, and deviance in the modern western world. My teaching and research are motivated by an interest in understanding the enormous promise, the often intractable challenges, and the ethical dilemmas that characterized the 20th century. Germany, in my view, is an ideal place to explore these themes. For it was, after all, the nation whose ideological conflicts, economic crises, scientific innovations, and catastrophic policies that epitomized the first part of the 20th century, while its division into consumerist wonderland and socialist experiment stood as a microcosm for the second half of the century."