I was born in Pittsburgh, PA, and am a die-hard Pirate and Steeler fan. That means, of course, that baseball season ends for me in May, and football season never ends. After I grew up, sort of, and left home, I went to Johns Hopkins University for my BA with a major in Anthropology. In 1982 I was graduated and took a year off to hitchhike in Europe and to work as a low-level clerk. Then it was off to Ann Arbor, MI for graduate training in German Labor History. In 1990 I came to Charleston, and the rest is History.
I am a strong believer in active learning. My best teaching days happen when students come to class well-prepared, having done and thought about the reading, leaving me to ask questions which help them think about the material in new, analytical ways.
I did my undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University, where I majored in Cultural Anthropology. I did graduate work at the Universitaet Tuebingen and the Freie Universitaet Berlin. My Ph.D. is from the University of Michigan.
I am interested in the cultural and social history of Twentieth Century Germany. Most of my publications have addressed Socialist and Communist popular culture and politics in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. My current, long-term, project is a synoptic history of Berlin in 1932, tentatively entitled Berlin: City on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown.