Modern European History

Apartment complex with nazi flags hanging from the window

The Department of History offers a vital and innovative course of study in Modern European history, a field which has been at the center of teaching and research at University of Illinois for over one hundred years. 

The program emphasizes comparative and interdisciplinary perspectives in addition to national area studies. Traditional strengths in British, German, and French history are complemented by research approaches that examine collective identities such as class, nation, and gender, collective memory, the organization of power and categories of culture, the formation of intellectual life, the uses of violence, the contours of everyday life and private life, colonial and postcolonial interactions, and the politics of representation. Recent courses focused on comparative topics: "Cities," "Memory and History," "History and Postcolonial Studies," "Europeans and Nature, 1750-1900," and "European Travellers in North America." 

Graduate students are encouraged to ground themselves in historical theory and methods, to gain teaching experience as assistants, and to undertake field research. Close collaboration binds modern Europeanists with their counterparts in allied  fields such as Russian history, East European history, British and Empire history, and Early Modern history as well as disciplines such as anthropology and comparative literature.  Students typically travel to Europe to pursue predissertation research at the end of their second year and formulate dissertation topics and apply for dissertation research grants in their third year. In the last years, graduate students at Illinois have regularly received predissertation grants from the Council for European Studies and dissertation grants from the Social Science Research Council and the German Academic Exchange Service. 

Core faculty in the program include:

Antoinette Burton: Professor Burton specializes in the history of modern Britain, gender, feminism and empire with an emphasis on colonial India. She is the author of two books on the impact of imperialism on Victorian culture: Burdens of History (North Carolina, 1994) and At the Heart of the Empire (California, 1998). Current research interests include Indian women writers in the 20th century; colonial modernity; and the fate of the nation in postcolonial history. Recent publications include an edited collection, Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (Routledge, 1999) and two journal articles: "Tongues Untied: Lord Salisbury's 'Black Man' and the Boundaries of Imperial Democracy," Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, 2:632-59 (2000) and "'The Purdahnashin in Her Setting': Colonial Modernity and the Zenana in Cornelia Sorabji's Memoirs," Feminist Review 65 (Summer 2000): 145-58.

Peter Fritzsche: A specialist in modern German history and a former Guggenheim and Humboldt fellow, Professor Fritzsche's current research focuses on comparative questions of memory and identity and vernacular uses of the past in modern Europe. His most recent book is Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (2004); his other publications include Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (1990); A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (1992); Reading Berlin 1900 (1996); and Germans into Nazis (1998). With Charles C. Stewart, he edited Imagining the Twentieth Century (1997). 

Harry Liebersohn: His most recent book is Aristocratic Encounters: European Travelers and North American Indians (Cambridge, 1998).  His article "Discovering Indigenous Nobility: Tocqueville, Chamisso and Romantic Travel Writing" appeared in The American Historical Review  in June 1994.  He is currently writing a book entitled Cosmopolitans: Travelers and Philosophers which examines cosmopolitanism in European thought and practice between  1750 and 1850.  His current interests include French and German intellectual/cultural history, the history of global and transnational thinking, and Europeans in the Pacific.  

Mark Micale: A specialist in modern European cultural and intellectual history, with an emphasis on findesiecle France, and in the history of science and medicine, especially psychiatry.  He currently has in progress two booklength projects: a history of medicine and masculinity and a history of the concept of psychological trauma.  He is also the author of "Approaching Hysteria: Disease and its Interpretations" (1995), the translator of "Beyond the Unconscious: Essays in the History of Psychiatry" (1994), and editor of "Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity" (2000); "The Mind of Modernism" (forthcoming); and "Discovering the History of Psychiatry" (1996)

Tamara Matheson: Assistant Professor Tamara Matheson specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of modern France, the history of women, gender, and sexuality, and the history of the media.  Her teaching reflects her commitment to the historical analysis of multiple media forms and often employs sources from film, music, art and television.  She brings her interest in the construction of individual and national identities to her latest project, a study of sexual revolutions in post-1945 Europe.

David Prochaska: A specialist in modern French history and former National Humanities Center Fellow, Professor Prochaska's current research focuses on the history of colonialism and postcolonial studies, especially colonial Algeria, the history of orientalism, and colonial photography. His publications include Making Algeria French: Colonialism in Bone, 18701920 (1990); "Art of Colonialism, Colonialism of Art: The Description de l'Egypte (18091828)," L'Esprit Createur, vol. 34 (1994); "Ethnography of a Postcolonial Site: Sarnath," Journal of Southeast Asian Architecture, vol. 1 (1996); and "History as Literature, Literature as History: Cagayous of Algiers," American Historical Review, vol. 101 (1996). 

Other faculty with expertise in Modern European studies include:

  • Eugene Avrutin (Department of History: Jewish History, emphasis Russia)
  • Matti Bunzl (Department of Anthropology: Jewish and Austrian history; queer theory) 
  • Richard Burkhardt, Jr. (Department of History: history of science) 
  • Clare Crowston (Department of History: France, comparative gender) 
  • William Kelleher (Department of Anthropology: contemporary Ireland) 
  • Diane Koenker (Department of History: Soviet Union, comparative labor, comparative gender) 
  • Craig Koslofsky (Department of History: early modern Germany, Renaissance,  Reformation) 
  • Carol Skalnik Leff (Department of Political Science: comparative politics) 
  • Jean-Philippe Mathy (Department of French: cultural studies, intellectual life) 
  • Karl-Heinz Schoeps (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures Emeriti: Weimar, Third Reich, and DDR literature) 
  • Mark Steinberg (Department of History: Russia, comparative labor, popular culture) 

Dissertations Completed in Modern European history since 1990: 

  • Katherine Aaslestad,  "The Transformation of Civic Identity and Local Patriotism in Hamurg, 1790-1815,"  (DAAD) 
  • David Bielanski, "Frontline Weimar: Paramilitary Mobilization and Masculine Representation in Postwar Germany", Ph.D. 2002 (DAAD)
  • Everett Carter, "King, Queen, Knave: Gambling and Social Herarchy in Nineteenth Century Germany," Ph.D. 2002
  • Sace Elder, "Murder Scenes: Criminal Violence in the Public Culture and Private Lives of Weimar Berlin," Ph.D. 2002 (DAAD, SSRC/Berlin) 
  • Bryan Ganaway, "Miniature Technologies: Toys and the Simulation of Nation, Gender, and Self in Wilhelmine Germany," Ph.D. 2002 (DAAD, Fulbright)
  • Jonathan Huener, "German Deeds, Polish Soil, Jewish Shoah: Auschwitz Memory  and the Politics of Commemoration," Ph.D 1997 (DAAD, SSRC/Berlin, 
    FulbrightHayes) 
  • Victor Libet, "Building the Border:  The Treatment of Immigrants in France, 1884-1914," (Chateaubriand, DAAD) 
  • Brent Maner, "The Search for Buried Nation: Prehistoric Archaeology in Germany, 1780-1890," Ph.D. 2001 (CES, SSRC/Berlin) 
  • Elise Moentmann, "Conservative Modernism at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris," Ph.D 1998 
  • David Murphy, "The Heroic Earth: The Flowering of Geopolitical Thought in  Weimar Germany," Ph.D 1992 (DAAD, SSRC/Berlin) 
  • H. Glenn Penny, "Cosmopolitan Visions and Municipal Displays: Museums, Markets, and the Ethnographic Project in Germany, 1868-1914," Ph.D 1998 (CES,DAAD, SSRC/Berlin, Institut fuer europaeische Geschichte) 
  • Joseph Perry, "The Private Life of the Nation: Christmas and the Invention of Modern Germany," PhD 1999 (CES, DAAD)
  • Jeffrey Smith, "A People's War: The Transformation of German Politics, 1913-1918," Ph.D 1996 (DAAD) 
  • Molly Wilkinson, "Sports, Mass Mobilization, and the Everyday Culture of Socialism in East Germany in the 1950s," Ph.D. 2003 (CES, DAAD, SSRC/Berlin)

Dissertations in progress 

  • Alex d'Erizans, "The Strangeness of Home: German Search for Identity amidst Trauma and Catastrophe in Hannover, 1945-1949," in progress
  • Michelle May, "The Republic and its Children: French Children's Literature, 1855-1900," in progress
  • Jason Tebbe, "Rituals of Memory: The Construction of Family in Wilhelmine, Germany", in progress (UIUC Research Fellowship)