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Photo: Annnette Hornischer

Associate Professor of History, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Tennessee

John P. Birkelund Fellow in the Humanities - Class of Fall 2014


Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville Monica Black focuses on the cultural and social history of Germany during the World Wars and since 1945. Methodologically, she is particularly interested in questions of narrative, in the philosophy, craft, and literature of history, as well as in those topics that seem to resist standard assumptions about the past. She earned her PhD at the University of Virginia (2006) and her BA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1998). In her first book, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge, 2010), Black recounted the story of Berliners’ evolving relationship to death, and traced transformations in rituals of burial and mourning over three turbulent decades in the German capital. Based on her dissertation, which was awarded the Fritz Stern Prize of the Friends of the German Historical Institute (2007), the book went on to receive the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History (2010) and the Hans Rosenberg Prize (2011). Black’s work has been funded by the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council on Germany, and other institutions. In 2014 she is also a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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