At its statutory January meeting, held as part of the 2026 meeting of the American Historical Association (in Chicago), the CEHS Executive Board approved the slate of candidates for the Society’s annual elections for positions on the Executive Board.
In 2026, the elections will be held between February 16 and February 23, 2026. Two positions will be filed namely the post of Vice President Elect (a four-year position) and At-Large Member (a three-year position). Ballots wil be sent to all those who are active members of the Society as of February 13, 2026. Because the Society uses a special platform (ElectionBuddy) for the ballotting, members should check their spam folders if they do not receive the email ballot.
There are two candidates for each of the two positions to be filled. Brief biographical statements for all four candidates appear below.
CANDIDATES FOR VICE PRESIDENT ELECT
Corinna Treitel
Washington University in St. Louis
Corinna Treitel is the William Eliot Smith professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on science, medicine, and popular culture and has received support from Citizens & Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Major publications include two books, Eating Nature in Modern Germany: Food Agriculture and Environment, c. 1870-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). Tentatively titled Gesundheit! Seeking German Health, 1750-2000, her current book explores the making of modern health consciousness via the German case. Treitel has a long track record of leadership, including founding a new minor in Medical Humanities and serving as department chair.
Jonathan Wiesen
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Jonathan Wiesen is Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He did his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley and the University of Sussex, and he received his PhD from Brown University in 1998. He is the author of West German Industry and the Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 (Chapel Hill, 2001), which won a book prize from the Hagley Museum and Library. He is also co-editor with Pamela Swett and Jonathan Zatlin of Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth Century Germany (Durham, 2007) and author of Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 2011). Recently he coauthored Nazi Germany: Society Culture, and Politics (Bloomsbury, 2024) with Pamela Swett, with whom he also undertook the revision of the volume on “Nazi Germany” for the GHI’s German History in Documents and Images platform. His work has appeared in, among other journals, Central European History, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Journal of Contemporary History, German History, and the German Studies Review, and he has received research fellowships from the German Academic Exchange, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. His most recent book, Modern Germany and the American Color Line, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press.
CANDIDATES FOR AT-LARGE MEMBER
Christine Johnson
Washington University in St. Louis
Christine Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis. Her first book, The German Discovery of the World: Renaissance Encounters with the Strange and Marvelous (UVA Press, 2008), examined the responses of German printers, humanists, mapmakers, merchants, botanists, and reformers to the Spanish and Portuguese expansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Her current project, “The German Nation of the Holy Roman Empire, 1440-1556,” analyzes how German identity converged and conflicted with imperial dynamics and claims. She has published in Past & Present, the Journal of Early Modern History, The Sixteenth-Century Journal, and several edited volumes, including The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations. A faithful participant in the triennial FNI (Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär) conference, she most recently presented on “Sharing the Printed Page: Latin and German in Renaissance Germany.” At WashU she teaches the introductory modern European history survey, undergrad courses on early modern European empires, capitalism, the Reformation, and the early modern city, among others, and works with graduate students specializing in early modern history and in European history from the medieval to modern periods. She served for several years in the AAUP Executive Committee (now a full-blown chapter!) at WashU and this past year served on the CEHS ad-hoc membership committee.
Daniel Riches
University of Alabama
Daniel Riches is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Alabama, where he has worked since receiving his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2007. His research focuses on the role of intellectual, cultural, and religious forces in early modern European politics, diplomacy, and warfare, with a particular emphasis on Central and Northern Europe. He is the author of Protestant Cosmopolitanism and Diplomatic Culture: Brandenburg-Swedish Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Brill, 2013), and co-editor of Religious Plurality at Princely Courts: Dynasty, Politics, and Confession in Central Europe, ca. 1555-1860 and Healing and Harm: Essays in Honor of Mary Lindemann, both of which were published by Berghahn in 2024. His research has received support and/or awards from the DAAD, the Andew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, and the United States Department of Education. He recently completed a two-year stint as Program Director for the German Studies Association.