Between February 14 and February 20, 2024, CEHS will hold elections to the open positions on its Executive Board, namely, one Vice President Elect and one Member At-Large. Ballots will be sent to all those who have become or have renewed their membership for 2024. Because CEHS uses a special platform (ElectionBuddy) for the balloting, members should check their spam folders if they do not receive the email ballot.
There are two candidates for each of the two positions. Brief biographical statements for all four candidates appear below.
Candidates for the position of Vice President Elect
Christina 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 also serves on the Executive Committee of the WashU AAUP.
Rita Krueger (Temple University)
Rita Krueger is an Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at Temple University. She completed her BA in History and German at Indiana University-Bloomington and her PhD in modern European history at Harvard University. Between 1997 and 2004 she served as Associate Director of the Center for Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia at UW-Madison and spent two years as a Vincent Wright Fellow at the European University Institute. She is currently a co-convener of the War and Violence Network for the German Studies Association. She is a specialist in 18th-century Habsburg history and the Central European Enlightenment. Her first book, Czech, German, and Noble: Status and National Identity in Habsburg Bohemia, was published by Oxford in 2009. She subsequently contributed a chapter and co-edited a volume on the Enlightenment in Bohemia and has published on nobility, Maria Theresia, and scientific and agrarian societies. In 2019, she won the R. John Rath prize for best article in the Austrian History Yearbook for her work on Franz von der Trenck. She is currently finishing a biography of Austrian Empress Maria Theresia and has begun a new research project on fame and knowledge networks in Central Europe that focuses on the intersection of transnational scientific authority, status, and local knowledge in the eighteenth century.
Candidates for the position of At-Large Member
Ke-Chin Hsia (Indiana University)
Ke-Chin Hisa is a historian of late imperial Habsburg Austria and German-speaking Central Europe in the 20th century. He is currently Assistant Professor of Modern European History and a faculty affiliate with both the Institute for European Studies and Russian and East European Institute at Indiana University Bloomington. Growing up in Taipei, Taiwan, he first came to the U.S. to study for Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His research interests revolve around the two World Wars and their impact on former Habsburg peoples from a global perspective, including issues about the welfare state, democratic citizenship, disability politics, humanitarian intervention, and about Central Europeans’ migration and refugee experiences. His publications include Victims’ State: War and Welfare in Austria, 1868-1925 (Oxford University Press, 2022), which is also an experiment in open access monograph publishing. He is additionally interested in ideas about sustainable recruitment for and diversifying (in all its meanings) the field of Central European history.
Lauren Stokes (Northwestern University)
Lauren Stokes is Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, where she teaches classes on German history, migration history, and the history of gender and sexuality. She is author of Fear of the Family: Guest Workers and Family Migration in the Federal Republic of Germany (Oxford, 2022), which explored the “family migrant,” the predominant category of authorized migration since the mid-1970s. She has also co-edited (with Ned Richardson-Little) a special issue of Central European History on the borders of East Germany, to which she contributed an article on how unauthorized migration through the Berlin Wall catalyzed new forms of policing in West Berlin. Her work has been supported by organizations including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Council on European Studies, and the Central European History Society. She currently serves as book review editor for Contemporary European History, and she is using the privilege of tenure to embark on new research projects on racism and anti-racism in divided Germany, the history of bisexuality, and mobility in the jet age.