Department of History

A historian of modern Germany, I am interested in the circulation of ideas, people, and goods across Europe and the North Atlantic World. I ask how such movements both shaped, and were shaped by, major events and developments in European history, from the industrial revolution to the formation of nation-states and the emergence of a new political subject. While there are many lenses through which to explore these histories, I believe that a focus on local spaces and on individuals can offer unique insight into the often-subtle workings of historical change. Such a close-up perspective helps us grapple with the bewildering range of influences, experiences, and calculations that informed contemporaries’ choices and actions at any given moment in time. I have found that this is especially true of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period characterized by an unusual degree of human mobility in Europe and indeed around the world.

 

My work to date has culminated in a book-length study titled The Migrant’s Spirit. How Industrial Revolution Came to the German Lands (forthcoming with Oxford University Press in August 2025). Rooted in a corpus of letters that was exchanged between German peasants, artisans, professionals, and businesspeople and their emigrant relatives in North America, the book reveals how insight and advice gleaned from abroad helped contemporaries come to terms with and navigate an emerging industrial modernity. Traces of this transatlantic dynamic can be found across nineteenth-century Germany society and its economy, a point that I have also made in the context of a separate study of financial markets in Frankfurt am Main, which appeared in the Journal of Modern History. More recently, I have shifted my attention towards war and the military. Tentatively titled War Stories. The Work of Soldiers and the Rules of Commerce, my next book project explores the ways in which warfare and military institutions facilitated the circulation of ideas about work, domesticity, and business, across Europe and the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds.