I am an Assistant Professor of History at Penn State Altoona where I teach courses in the histories of modern Europe, Latin America, and the history of medicine. Tending towards the comparative and transnational, my research focuses on Europe’s global connections. Areas of special interest to me include borderlands, colonialism, nationalism, migration, religion, environmental history, and medical history.
I am currently working on my second book project titled The Sword Outside, the Plague Within: Influenza, War, and Religion, 1918-1920, which compares rural and religious interpretations of the “Spanish flu” pandemic in Central Europe and the British Isles. In February 2020, my prize-winning dissertation was published as a book titled Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age, for the German Historical Institute’s Cambridge University Press series. This book concerns how groups of people fashion collective narratives as nations, religions, and diasporas. My work has also appeared in the peer-reviewed Comparative Studies in Society and History, German Studies Review, Journal of Mennonite Studies, Indiana Magazine of History, and the periodicals In These Times and Mennonite.
From 2014-2017, I served as a research associate for the global oral history project titled “Seven Points on Earth” that investigates the environmental and religious factors affecting seven Mennonite farming communities around the world. This project was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. From 2016-2017, I was the Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Migration at the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C. and before that I was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa where I taught courses for the German Iowa and the Global Midwest public humanities initiative.