Bradley Naranch
Office Location: LA 264
Office Telephone: (406) 243-6491
E-mail: bradley.naranch@mso.umt.edu
Current Position:
Visiting Assistant Professor of History
Description:
Bradley Naranch joined the UofM History Department in September 2011, having recently held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and, prior to that, taught as a visiting assistant professor at the College of William and Mary. He is a specialist in the history of nineteenth-century Germany, including its former overseas colonies, and is interested more generally in approaches to modern Central Europe that place its continental histories within larger global contexts. While at the University of Montana, he hopes to complete work on two major projects: a volume of essays on German colonialism and its proximate after effects, which he is co-editing with Geoff Eley at the University of Michigan; and a book-length manuscript for Oxford University Press that revises conventional histories of German national unification by incorporating lesser-known stories of overseas expansion, exploration, and empire building from the 1830s to the early twentieth century.
Field Of Study:
Modern Europe; transnational/global/international (TGI).
Courses:
Fall 2012
Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
Twentieth-Century Europe on Screen
The Social History of Combat (UDW seminar)
Spring 2013
Modern Germany, 1806-Present
The World of Charles Darwin
Berlin: Culture, Architecture, Memory
Hobbies:
A former high school soccer player and middle-distance runner, I now prefer outdoor activities that require considerably less coaching, preparation, and training. This has sometimes included rather amatuerish efforts at cross-country skiing (in the Berkshires) and nearly disasterous bouts of poorly-equipped mountaineering (in the Alps and Carpathians). Now they tend to take the safer and more sensible form of day-length hikes in the surrounding woodlands, wetlands, mountain ranges, beaches, riparian corridors, and urban spaces in which I happen to find myself. Such recent experiences include a clothing-optional soak in the "waterfall pool" at Jerry Johnson Hot Springs in Idaho's Clearwater National Forest (they were); a lonely snowshoe trek to the 8000 ft summit of Paulina Peak in the Newberry National Volcanic Monument outside Bend, Oregon; a rainy, misty, fog-dripped January hike to secluded Fern Falls in the Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park in Del Norte County, California; a late spring Yosemite Valley tour of Vernal, Nevada, and Yosemite waterfalls; a September morning continental divide excursion along the Higline Trail in Glacier National Park to the Grinnell Glacier Overlook; a winter rainstorm hike from the mouth of the Klamath River to Hidden Beach; and a visit to the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds in Central Oregon (shown in background in my profile picture).
I inherited from my father a passion for the culinary arts, story-telling, and serendipitous travel and from my mother an abiding affection for books, baking, and gardening. More recently, I am learning from my wife the values of vegetarianism, experimenting with raw vegan cooking (if you can call it that), patronizing local farmers markets, and choosing fairly-traded organic foods. A native West Virginian who left the familiar confines of the upper Ohio Valley to be educated on scholarship at otherwise unaffordable East Coast colleges and universities, I am learning more about the North American West and Pacific Rim through a combination of intimate personal encounters (think: poison oak) and occasional outside reading, especially the work of Richard White, Patricia Limerick, Dan Flores, Joseph Kinsey Howard, Wallace Stegner, Henry Miller, Norman Maclean, A. B. Guthrie, K. Ross Toole, Rick Bass, Ivan Doig, Pam Houston, Mary Clearman Blew, and the abridged travel journals of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Taking a sun & moon snowshoe hike from the Lolo Pass visitor's center to Glade Creek Camp and ascending its surrounding ridges is a great way to experience the historic Lewis & Clark trail. Standing on top of 90 inches of hoarfrost-covered soft powder snow, watching a Pacific sunset to one side, and a mountain zone full moonrise to the other, is just one of many reasons that I enjoy being a professor at the UofM. But it's a really good one!
Education:
PhD, Johns Hopkins University, 2007
MA, Johns Hopkins University, 1998
BA, Williams College, 1996
Teaching Experience:
2008-2011: Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow in the humanities, Stanford University
2007-2008: visiting assistant professor of history, the College of William and Mary
Selected Publications:
“Global Proletarians, Uncle Toms, and Native Savages: Popular German Race Science in the Emancipation Era,” in Germany and the Black Diaspora: Points of Contact, 1215-1914, ed. Mischa Honeck, Martin Klimke, and Anne Kuhlmann-Smirnov (forthcoming with Berghahn Books, 2013).
“Between Cosmopolitanism and German Colonialism: Nineteenth-Century Hanseatic Networks in Emerging Tropical Markets.” In Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660-1914, ed. Margrit Schulte-Beerbühl and Andreas Gestrich (London: German Historical Institute, 2011), 99-132. (This article has been translated into German and republished in a 2012 issue of the Hamburger Wirtschafts-Chronik).
“Made in China: Austro-Prussian Overseas Rivalry and the Global Unification of the German Nation.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 56, no. 3 (September 2010): 367-381.
