Your students have often said that your lectures are well organized and fluid. How do you organize class time around a mixture of lecture and 'critical thinking'?

I design each of my formal lectures around a question and then spend the lecture providing an answer to the question based on historical evidence. In this way, each of my lectures demonstrates critical thinking in action in the form of making an argument. At the larger level, my classes themselves are built around a larger question. For my survey course on Modern Europe, for example, we investigate “how did Europe go from the center of global power, wealth, and influence at the dawn of the nineteenth century to a continent that laid in literal ruins by the middle of the twentieth, and how was it rebuilt after that?” Each lecture’s question and answer then provides part of the answer to that larger question. In discussion in all my classes, we analyze both primary and secondary sources to determine, through critical thinking, what we can learn about a particular historical moment from a primary source and undertake critical analysis of secondary sources.

You have also been frequently praised for your ability to illustrate points in class with “compelling historical narratives.” How do you decide what narratives to tell?

Historical research is built around two intertwined processes. First, historians determine what happened in the past based on sources, materials such as archival documents, media articles, and oral histories. Then we have to tackle, which for me at least is, the harder part: explaining how and in what ways the historical narrative matters. In other words, explaining the “so what?” In class, I choose historical narratives to share in order to illustrate “so whats.”

Your research is largely on post-War Germany. How do you integrate your scholarship into your teaching and vice versa?

One of the many highlights at working at Trinity is having the opportunity to integrate my research into my teaching. I teach, for example, a 2000-level course on borders in Modern Europe, so I am able to include my research on a sixty-person German farming village that was split in two by the Cold War Iron Curtain. I share with students, for example, reports from East German government spies who were living in the village and secretly surveilling the community. We then discuss what we can learn about the village and East Germany from the reports. I sometimes share with students too some of my in-progress research. Having their feedback is extremely useful to me in the research and writing process.

What is the best piece of advice on teaching that you have ever received?

My advisor in graduate school was an award-winning teacher, a top-flight scholar, and a stellar overall professional role model. Watching him in action while I was his teaching assistant provided me a stellar mentor to look up to pedagogically.