The Brown Center invites you to our Faculty Spotlight on Thursday, October 26th at 12:00 PM on Zoom. The spotlight series is a showcase of research, creative inquiry, and other scholarly engagement of the campus community. Stop by and learn about the research of our talented Stetson community!
Sign-up Link:
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Dr. Eric Kurlander – Professor of History and Director of Jewish Studies
Department of History
Before the Final Solution. A Global History of the Nazi “Jewish Question”
In Summer 2023, while based at the Institute for Contemporary History (Munich), I made a series of five research trips over ten weeks, approximately one trip every other week, to the Federal Archive in Koblenz, which houses the personal papers of many prominent Nazi officials; the Federal Archive Berlin, which has the bulk of Nazi party and government files; the Berlin State Library, which holds one of the best collections of published primary sources from the interwar period; and the Federal Archive Freiburg, which houses files on the German military and military administration in the occupied territories. As a result of this research, I achieved three substantial outcomes: a completed draft of Chapter Three (“Hitler’s ‘Jim Crow’ Laws? ‘Dissimilation’ as ‘Solution’ to the Nazi ‘Jewish Question’”); a reconceived outline of the book (most notably Chapters Five through Eight); and a third outcome I did not initially anticipate having the time or material to complete: a journal article revising our understanding of the so-called “Madagascar Plan” (“Prelude to Genocide or Late-Stage ‘Territorialism’? The ‘Madagascar Plan’ in Comparative and Colonial Context, 1936-1940”) that I have submitted to the Journal of Genocide Research. After briefly discussing the general framework of my book project, I will focus on outlining each of these three outcomes.
Dr. Eric Kurlander (MA/PhD Harvard University) is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Modern European History at Stetson University (Deland, FL, USA), where he has taught since 2001. His books include Modern Germany: A Global History, co-authored with Bernd-Stefan Grewe and Douglas McGetchin (Oxford University Press, 2023); Hitler’s Monsters: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 2017; paperback 2018); Living With Hitler: Liberal Democrats in the Third Reich (Yale, 2009); The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898-1933 (Berghahn, 2006);and two co-edited volumes, Revisiting the ‘Nazi Occult’: Histories, Realities, Legacies, with Monica Black (Camden House, 2015), and Transcultural Encounters between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in the 19thand 20th Centuries, with Joanne Miyang Cho and Douglas McGetchin (Routledge, 2014). Kurlander’s current book project is titled Before the “Final Solution”: A Global History of the Nazi “Jewish Question”, 1919-1941.