My research spans the cultural, military, political, and intellectual history of the United States and German-speaking world across the modern and contemporary eras (1789-present). Most of my published work has explored how individuals, institutions, and societies interpret their experiences, construct collective identities, and adapt (or fail to adapt) to changing circumstances.
Currently, my work is focused on approaching military history through a transnational perspective, examining the entangled German martial past through the widest possible lens. More specifically, my current research agenda examines the globally dispersed world of German military service between the revolutions of 1848/49 and the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 (a period I refer to as the ‘global Nachmärz’), following German-speaking soldiers across European state armies, foreign legions, revolutionary movements, colonial conflicts, and — most especially — the American Civil War. By situating the experiences of men who self-identified as Germans while serving in foreign armies within a global German history, this research seeks to challenge traditional institutionally bounded narratives of German military development, while also exploring how foreign military service contributed to evolving and ever-contested understandings of German identity, nationhood, belonging, and responsibility during the era and beyond. In addition to this major effort, another ongoing project concerns the entangled forging and harnessing of West German, British, and American memory of National Socialism’s military history in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Soldiers from Experience: The Forging of Sherman’s Fifteenth Army Corps, 1862-1863 (LSU Press, 2022), my award-winning first book, examined the emergence of distinctive tactical cultures within military organizations, exploring how combat experiences, physical terrain, and interactions with civilian populations shaped soldiers’ collective behavior on and off the battlefield and ultimately influenced the U.S. Army’s transition toward “hard war” during the American Civil War.
My 2024 book, Siren Songs: The Perils of Interwar Escapism (Army University Press), juxtaposed German and U.S. military histories of 20th century military transformation, investigating how armies confronting the complicated legacies of defeat can become captive to institutional myths, developing concepts of war based on seductive visions of future warfare rather than meaningfully confronting past failures.
A further strand of my research concerns the history of encyclopedias and encyclopedism in the Western world, including the evolution of cultural norms concerning the proper form, purpose, function, and organization of encyclopedic works and the intellectual origins of the electronic multimedia encyclopedia in the late twentieth century.