I am Professor of History at the University of Michigan, where I have taught since 2003. I received a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1999 and a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Washington in 1990 and 1992.
I am a scholar of modern Europe with particular expertise in immigration and human mobility; race and ethnicity; and colonialism and postcolonialism. Trained in European cultural and intellectual history, I have sought to apply these modes of inquiry to my ongoing interest in how difference and diversity have shaped the very terms of modern Germany and Europe more generally. My research and writing have been supported by the SSRC, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
My areas of interest include postwar Germany, Britain, and France; immigration and migration studies; racial and ethnic minorities; colonialism and postcolonialism; gender; and European Leftism and the New Left. I am beginning a new book project called Original Sin: Race and Reparations in the US and Germany, which compares how the United States and Germany have variously grappled with their “original sins” of slavery and the Holocaust and shows how each society’s efforts to come to terms with its past have shaped contemporary race relations.
I am currently serving as Associate Dean of Social Sciences at Rackham Graduate School. I am the faculty sponsor for a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop on Migration and Displacement. In addition, I am actively engaged in the History Department’s career diversity and professionalization initiatives.