Bio
I am a historian of imagination; the construction of meaning by people and institutions in the past through fantasy, the articulation of those fantasies through cultural expression, and the transformation of that meaning into concrete policy behavior and goals. I try to explain how people in the past used their imaginations to construct usable versions of the past, present, or future. The context within which I conduct this research into imaginary worlds is as a historian of race, religion, culture, and play in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany.
This interest began with the imaginary internationalism of Protestant missionaries and now turns to military and political gamers in Germany and the United States in the wake of the Holocaust. My current research is oriented around understanding how German and American military planners and wargaming hobbyists imagined the recent past (World War II and the Holocaust) and conceived of the future (the Cold War). How did they imagine warfare and security policy through the invented worlds of tabletop warfare?
The answers to these questions form the core of a planned book-length manuscript tentatively titled “Toy Soldiering: West German Rearmament, the Holocaust, and the United States.” The book studies the birth of modern tabletop board- and role-playing games in the United States and Germany and the simultaneous creation of the German-American military, economic, and cultural alliance from 1945 to 1980. As part of the creation of this alliance, German military might had to be “domesticated” and the Holocaust had to be forgotten.
The creation and propagation of a “Clean Wehrmacht Myth” of German military innocence assisted in the remaking of German military power from existential threat to reliable ally. From this imagined past, the project turns to examine how the Myth entered into American and German hobby gaming, where it became a repository of Holocaust amnesia and denial. Research for this project has taken me to military archives in the United States and Germany; to government agencies in both countries; and to museum and library collections dedicated to games and fan culture. It has received support from Iowa State University, the American Philosophical Society, the Holocaust Educational Foundation at Northwestern University, and with a Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow at The Strong National Museum of Play.
Like my current research my first book, Heavenly Fatherland: German Missionary Culture in the Age of Empire (University of Toronto Press, 2021), looked at the intersection of real-world policy and imaginary pasts, presents, and futures. In this book I illustrate how German Protestant missionaries imagined their place in a globalized, colonized world before World War I. At the core of the book is an analysis of the interaction among German Protestant missionaries, missionized Africans in the colony of German East Africa, and white Protestants in Germany. I investigate the theological, cultural, and political activities of missionaries, missionary societies, and missionary intellectuals as they worked to manifest an imagined international community. Following the missionaries’ own imaginations, Heavenly Fatherland shows the possible international communities that Germany’s Protestant missionaries sought to create and the wider purpose evangelization was expected to serve. I argue missionaries mediated much of ordinary Germans’ experiences of globalization, ultimately endorsing a cosmopolitan worldview over parochial German nationalism.
The research for this project was supported by German-American Fulbright Commission, the German Historical Institute, and the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities at Iowa State University among others. In 2021, Heavenly Fatherland won the Best First Book Award from Phi Alpha Theta, the academic honor society for history. The International Bulletin of Mission Research also named it one of “Ten Outstanding Books in Mission Studies, Intercultural Theology, and World Christianity for 2021.”
I translate my research into high-impact and engaging teaching for the Department of History. I teach courses in the history of Germany, modern Europe, and Western Civilization. I also teach courses on the history of racism and racialized violence, including courses on the Holocaust and comparative genocide. I work to introduce innovative new methods to my teaching and have received a Miller Faculty Fellowship from the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Iowa State University as well as two grants from the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University to develop new course offerings and curricula. I also serve as the Department of History’s Director of Undergraduate Studies.
For my entire career, I have worked as a Holocaust and anti-racism educator. I have been a Fellow at the Summer Institute of the Holocaust Educational Foundation and a participant in the Jack and Anita Hess Faculty Seminar at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. In summer 2019 I joined the Iowa Council for Holocaust Education. I continue to collaborate with educators across the Midwest and the United States to develop new and engaging courses and programming related to Holocaust education.
In addition to my work as a historical educator, I am a Program Faculty member in Iowa State’s Game Design Program, one of the university’s Degrees of the Future. As part of the core development team, I worked with my colleagues to design and implement this brand-new program, which launched in Fall 2025. For the major, I teach courses in game studies that focus on the narratological, world-building, and sociological elements of game design.
Ask An Historian
What’s an unusual item you’ve found in the archives?
I’ve found amazing games and records of people playing games. One of the best was produced during the 1930s in Germany. It was a game about traveling around Germany, learning its geography. The game had clearly been owned and played by a child during the years after Germany began “regaining” and annexing other territories. The owner had drawn in new borders and labeled them with new names, using it to help imagine the changing world they were living in. Though the way the child altered the game was ill-omened, it was easy to imagine that child laying on the floor of their rooms, carefully updating their game to make its play more ‘real.’