My first book, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era, appeared with Princeton University Press in 2017. This book tells the story of a predominantly rural and historically pacifist religious community that developed complex relationships with German nationalism across three continents in concert with rising transnational sensibilities. Chosen Nation contributes to scholarship that emphasizes the malleability, historical contingency, and socially situated nature of nationalist practices and ways of thinking about national belonging. By adopting global and transnational perspectives, this book examines how insights developed by historians of nationalism travel and refract when viewed through the actions and experiences of one small, densely networked religious group whose members lived and moved across Europe and the world. In 2018, Chosen Nation was shortlisted for the European Studies Book Award, conferred by the Council for European Studies.
Drawing on sources from Poland to Paraguay, this project inspired my passion for multi-continental archival research, and it prompted me to turn the tools of global and transnational history to the study of environmental science and planetary thought. I have published peer-reviewed articles related to this project in German Studies Review and Antisemitism Studies.
Reviews and endorsements for Chosen Nation are available here.