Bio

I currently work in the museum world in Washington, DC. Having trained as a historian of modern German history, I also maintain an active research agenda. My research interests include German history in transnational perspective; international youth culture in the long-1960s; and the antecedents to and long-term impacts of Nazism globally. I recently co-edited a volume on socialist subjectivities in the latter decades of East Germany that uses queer theory as a methodological frame for rethinking normative, linear narratives of East Germans’ lives and state socialism’s collapse. See my recent post on the publication of the volume.

I am working on two book projects. My first book project traces the rise of an international youth culture in East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on how East German youth overcame the barriers of the “Iron Curtain,” not only in Europe, but globally. It begins with the World Festival of Youth and Students, known more colloquially as the Red Woodstock, which brought together hundreds of thousands of youth from the East, West, and global South for nine days of seminars, rallies, rock and folk music performances, as well as other activities, all in the name of anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, and solidarity. I published an article in Central European History journal about the festival.

My second book project is still in the preliminary stages. Broadly conceived, it explores knowledge production relating to bodily harm at the nexus of German colonialism, the Holocaust, Nazi ideology, and postwar German neocolonial projects in the global South. Working backward from German government reparation cases, I am interested in where and when knowledge around bodily violence has been acknowledged officially, resulting in compensation, and the connections that can be traced between such incidents across space and time. I published my first article from the project in Humanity Journal, which investigates the human rights abuses that occurred at a German settlement in Chile, known as Colonia Dignidad, in the 1970s-90s. Using the colony as its focal point, the article traces the pre-existing connections between Chileans and Germans going back to the informal German empire of the nineteenth century, through the Third Reich, and into the postwar period. This will be one of a series of case studies for my second book that draws on the intersections of German colonialism, Nazism, and human rights abuses in the global South.

I have taught a range of history, gender, and critical theory courses at George Washington University, American University, Boston Architectural College, and Lesley University. Visit my teaching page for course syllabi and assignments.

In a previous life, I worked for the National Democratic Institute, organizing parliamentary exchange programs with parliamentarians from around the world. A couple highlights from those years include assisting with organizing a conference for parliamentary librarians in Warsaw, Poland and serving as an international election observer in Kosovo.

[Views expressed in my work and on this site are my own and do not reflect any institutions or centers that I am affiliated with or work for]