Professor
207-786-6071
Pettengill Hall, Room 121
I teach modern European history. Just as students may change their major interests during a college career, I have shifted my focus for teaching and research over the 20 years I have been at Bates. I arrived here in 1979 as a social and economic historian of modern Europe, still working on my dissertation about migration in Germany. Just last year that project was finally completed as a book, Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany 1820-1989, published by the University of Michigan Press.
Over the past dozen years I have become consumed by a new interest, the history of the Holocaust. I began by giving historical advice to a local group who was interviewing survivors in Maine. I interviewed my grandmother, who had fled from Vienna to Shanghai. These modest beginnings grew into major commitments. I have been on the board of directors of the Holocaust Human Rights Center of Maine since 1993. I have now interviewed over 100 Jews who were refugees to Shanghai, spending the war there under Japanese occupation, but surviving, unlike their relatives who could not leave Europe. To see more go to: bates.edu/Library/aboutladd/departments/special/shanghai.shtml. This is my major research project for the foreseeable future. My teaching has shifted, too, as I now offer a course on the Holocaust every other year.
The freedom to pursue my changing intellectual interests and to communicate them to students are continuing wonders for me as a member of the Bates faculty.
Classes:
"I arrived here in 1979... still working on my dissertation.... Just last year that project was finally completed...."
It took this guy 25 years to finish writing a book from his dissertation? Geez, what a slacker! I guess he wrote one word a day.