I am a historian of modern Europe. My research focuses on the cultural and social history of Germany, with an emphasis on the era of the World Wars and the decades immediately after 1945. Much of my work has concerned how National Socialism functioned in daily life, and what happened to it after 1945.

I think of my writing as a type of historical ethnography, and I bring to it a strong interest in everyday life, the formation of vernacular knowledge, and the unquestioned and often unconscious codes and conventions through which societies construct their sense of reality and order. I always return to the question of the social conditions that can give force, authority, and gravity to ideas or that, conversely, can jeopardize the world’s knowability and knowledge’s believability.

My most enduring interest concerns the formation of moral worlds—worlds we human beings make and inhabit, mostly without our being fully aware of doing so—and which determine our sense of right and wrong, justice and purity, ugliness and offense, worth and value. Such worlds can take an endless variety of historical forms.

The questions that drive my work are existential and epistemic as well as historical, and they do not always have ready-made archives. To find a way to approach them, it helps to look in unexpected places. It helps to keep an eye out for the random, accidental, strange, and apparently inconsequential.

I am a Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), where I have been a faculty member in the history department since 2010. From 2021 to 2023, I served as associate director of the UT Humanities Center. Earlier in my career, I taught at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina and at the University of Virginia. Since 2019, I have been the editor of the journal Central European History (Twitter: @CentralEuropean). I also serve as an associate review editor for the American Historical Review and served from 2016 - 2021 as a member of the editorial board of German Studies Review. In 2022, I joined the German Studies Association’s executive board. In 2023, I was named to the advisory board of the George L. Mosse Series in the History of Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas (University of Wisconsin Press). In 2014, I was awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin. I have been a fellow of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University and the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities have supported my research. I am a member of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)’s Committee T on College and University Governance.