I am an Assistant Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona campus. I teach courses in the history of modern Europe and am presently revising my book manuscript, Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age, for Cambridge University Press.
My work focuses on modern Europe and modern Latin America, with an emphasis on refugees, migrants, and transnational networks. In general, my research examines how groups of people fashion collective narratives as nations, religions, and diasporas. I have written articles for the peer-reviewed publications German Studies Review, Indiana Magazine of History, and Journal of Mennonite Studies, and the periodicals In These Times and Mennonite. I also have a forthcoming chapter titled “Comparative Narratives: Russlanddeutsch Migration Stories” in a volume titled Russian Germans in a Comparative Context that will be published by the German Federal Institute for the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe (Berlin: De Gruyter).
From 2014-2017 I also 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.