Prof. H. Glenn Penny

Academic Positions

• Professor and Henry J. Bruman Chair in German History, UCLA, since 2022
• John Simon Guggenheim Fellows, 2021 - 22
• Fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin, 2017-2018
• Professor of History, University of Iowa, 2014-2022
• Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Iowa, 2006 - 2014
• Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Iowa, 2003 - 2006
• Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Missouri—Kansas City, 2000 - 2003
• James Bryant Conant Fellow, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, 1999 - 2000

Education

• Ph. D.  Department of History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999.
• Dissertation: “Cosmopolitan Visions and Municipal Displays:  Museums, Markets, and the Ethnographic Project in Germany, 1868-1914.”  (Received the Fritz Stern Prize from the German Historical Institute, Washington, D. C.).
• M. A.  University of Colorado at Boulder, 1991.
• B. A.  University of Colorado at Boulder, 1987.

See full CV

Monographs

• German History Unbound: 1750s to the Present. (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2022).
• In Humboldt’s Shadow:  A Tragic History of German Ethnology (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, June 2021).
• Im Schatten Humboldts:  Eine tragische Geschichte der deutschen Ethnologie
• (Munich:  C. H. Beck, 2019).
• Kindred by Choice:  Germans and American Indians since 1800. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013). Paperback edition, 2015.  (Received the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Book Award, and the Franz Steiner Book Award, German Historical Institute.  Also named a 2014 Choice Outstanding Academic Title).
• Objects of Culture:  Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002). (Received the Charles Smith Award from the Southern Historical Association in 2004 and the William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology, Honorable Mention from the American Anthropological Association, 2003).

Edited Works

• Co-editor with Stefan Rinke, Special Issue: “Rethinking Germans Abroad,” Geschichte & Gesellschaft 41 (2015).
• Editor, Special Issue: “Germans and Brazilians,” German History 33 no. 3 (2015).
• Co-editor with Laura R. Graham, Performing Indigeneity:  Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences (Lincoln:  Nebraska University Press, 2014).
• “German History Beyond National Socialism.”  Forum including Margaret L. Anderson, Carl Caldwell, Christian Goeschel, Ian McNeeley, and Andrew Zimmerman.  German History 28 no. 2, (2011):  470-484.
• Co-editor with Matti Bunzl, Worldly Provincialism:  German Anthropology in the Age of Empire. (Ann Arbor:  The University of Michigan Press, 2003).

Articles and Book Chapters

• “Reflections on (Post)Socialist Curated Environments,” in Philipp Schorch and Daniel Habit eds., Curating (Post)socialist Environments, 329-37 (Bielefeld:  Transit, 2020).
• “The Expressionists’ Workshop? German Ethnographic Museums in the Age of Empire,” in Dorthe Aagesen, Beatrice von Bormann, and Anna Vestergaard Jorgensen eds. Kirschner and Nolde.  Expressionism Colonialism, 34-47 (Amsterdam:  Hirmer, 2020).
• “The Future in the Past,” Peter N. Miller ed. The Museum in the Cultural Sciences:  Collecting, Displaying, and Interpreting Material Culture in the Twentieth Century, 229-233 (New York:  Bard Graduate College, 2020).
• “Knowing Others: German Children and American Indians,” in Simone Lässig et. al. The World of Children, 159-181 (New York:  Berghahn, 2019).
•  “Diversity, Inclusivity, and Germanness in Latin America during the Interwar Period,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C., 61 (Fall, 2017): 85-108.
•  “From Migrant Knowledge to Fugitive Knowledge?  German Migrants and Knowledge Production in Guatemala, 1880s-1945,” Geschichte & Gesellschaft 43 no. 3 (2017): 381-412.
• “Material Connections: German Schools, Things, and Soft Power in Argentina and Chile from the 1880s through the Interwar Period,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 59, no. 3 (2017):  519-49.
•  “Knotenpunkte und Netzwerke:  Auslandsschulen in Chile, 1880-1960,” (Nodal Points and Networks:  German Schools in Chile, 1880-1960) Geschichte, Wissenschaft, & Unterricht 67 no. 5/6 (2016): 281-294.
• “Bastian’s Vision:  Franz Boas und die Deutsche Museumsethnologie,” (Bastian’s Vision:  Franz Boas and German Museum Ethnology) in Kulturkriese—Leo Frobenius und seine Zeit (Studien zur Kulturkunde Bd. 129). Edited by Jean-Louis Georget, Hélène Ivanoff und Richard Kuba. Berlin:  Reimer-Verlag 2016, 97-105.
• “Historiographies in Dialog: Beyond the Categories of Germans and Brazilians” German History 33 no. 3 (2015): 347-366.
• “Germans Abroad:  Respatializing Historical Narrative,” co-authored with Stefan Rinke, Geschichte & Gesellschaft 41 (2015): 173-196.
• “Performing Indigeneity: Emergent Identity, Self-determination, and Sovereignty,” co-authored with Laura R. Graham, in Graham and Penny ed., Performing Indigeneity (2014), 1-40.
• “Not Playing Indian:  Surrogate Indigeneity and German Hobbyism,” in Graham and Penny ed., Performing Indigeneity (2014), 196-237.
• “Ambiguities, Fractures, and Myopic Historiographies:  Recent work on Germans in Eastern Europe,” Contemporary European History 23, 1 (2014):  133-149.
• “Latin American Connections:  Recent work on German Interactions with Latin America,” Central European History 46 no. 2 (2013): 362-394.
• “German Polycentrism and the Writing of History,” German History, 29, no. 2 (2012): 265-282.
• “The Insistence of World History: Jürgen Osterhammel’s Die Verwandlung der Welt,” German History 28, no. 2 (2011):  505-511.
• “The German Love Affair with American Indians:  Rudolf Cronau’s Epiphany,” www.common-place.org · Vol. 11, no. 04: July 2011.
• “Atlantic Transfers: Recent Work on the German-American Exchange,” German History 26 no. 4, (2008), 563-575.
• “Red Power:  Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and Indian Activist Networks in East and West Germany,” Central European History 41, no. 3 (2008), 447-476.
• “The Fate of the Nineteenth Century in German Historiography,” The Journal of Modern History 80 (March 2008): 81–108.
• “Transnational History in Historical Perspective: Adolf Bastian’s Global Vision” in Adolf Bastian and His Universal Archive of Humanity:  The Origins of German Anthropology. Edited by Manuela Fischer, Peter Bolz and Susan Kamel. Hildesheim:  Olms Verlag, 2007, 50-55.
• “Traditions in the German Language,” in A New History of Anthropology.  Edited by Henrika Kuklick. Oxford:  Blackwell, 2007, 79-95.
• “Illustrating America:  Images of the North American Wild West in German Periodicals, 1825-1890,” in I Like America.  Edited by Pamela Kort, Frankfurt:  Schirn Kunsthalle, 2006, 141-157.
• “Elusive Authenticity:  The Quest for the Authentic Indian in German Public Culture” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48, no. 4 (2006), 798-818.
• “Die Welt im Museum: Räumliche Ordnung, globales Denken und Völkerkundemuseen im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert” (The World in the Museum:  Spatial Order, Global Thinking, and Ethnological Museums at the end of the Nineteenth Century) in Welt-Räume:  Geschichte, Geographie und Globalisierung seit 1900.   Edited by Sabine Höhler and Iris Schröder. Frankfurt/Main:  Campus, 2005, 75-99.
• “The Politics of Anthropology in the Age of Empire:  German Colonists, Brazilian Indians, and the Case of Alberto Vojtech Fric,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, no. 2 (2003) 240-280  (Received the 2003 Nineteenth Century Studies Association Article Prize).
• “Bastian’s Museum:  On the Limits of Empiricism and the Transformation of German Ethnology,” in Worldly Provincialism, Penny and Bunzl ed., 86-126.
• “Worldly Provincials:  Rethinking the History of Anthropology, Colonialism, and Race,” co-authored with Matti Bunzl, in Worldly Provincialism, 1-30.
• “Wissenschaft in einer polyzentrischen Nation. Der Fall der deutschen Ethnologie,” (Science in a Polycentric Nation:  The Case of German Ethnology) in Wissenschaft und Nation in der Europäischen Geschichte.  Edited by Ralph Jenssen and Jakob Vogel.  Frankfurt/Main:  Campus, 2003, 80-94.
• “The Civic Uses of Science:  Ethnology and Civil Society in Imperial Germany,” Osiris vol. 17, July 2002, 228-252.
• “Science and the Marketplace:  The Creation and Contentious Sale of the Museum Godeffroy,” Pacific Arts 21/22 (July 2000):  7-22.
• “‘Beati possedentes:’ Die Aneignung materieller Kultur und die Anschaffungspolitik des Leipziger Völkerkundemuseums,” (The commodification of material culture and the politics of possession in Leipzig’s Völkerkunde museum)” Comparativ:  Leipziger Beiträge zur Universalgeschichte und vergleichenden Gesellschaftsforschung 10, H. 5/6 2000:  68-103
• “Fashioning Local Identities in an Age of Nation-Building:  Museums, Cosmopolitan Traditions, and Intra-German Competition,” German History 17, no. 4 (1999):  488-504.
• “Municipal Displays.  Civic self-promotion and the development of German ethnographic museums, 1870-1914,” Social Anthropology 6, no. 2 (1998): 157-168.
• “The Museum für Deutsche Geschichte and German National Identity,” Central European History 28, no. 3 (1995):  343-372.  (Received the Joseph Ward Swain article prize, 1997).

Recent Scholarly Blog Posts

• migrantknowledge.org/2020/08/07/routes-of-knowledge/
• blog.uni-koeln.de/gssc-humboldt/ethnological-collections-and-municipal-displays/
• www.wiko-berlin.de/fellows/alumni/fellowclub/newsletter/maerz-2018/the-future-of-the-humboldt-forum-an-epiphany/
• blog.uni-koeln.de/gssc-humboldt/exasperation-an-outsiders-take-on-some-of-the-current-debates-surrounding-the-humboldt-forum/
• historyofknowledge.net/2017/10/18/insights-into-loss-from-the-history-of-knowledge/
• histanthro.org/beyond-heroic-professionals/