Contact
Email:
bkarch@lsu.edu
Brendan Karch is an assistant professor of history at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, USA. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2010. As a historian of Central and Eastern Europe, his earlier work focused on nationalism in the German-Polish borderlands. His first book examined the fraught efforts of nationalist activists to earn the long-term loyalties of a bilingual, Catholic borderland population in Upper Silesia. His research on Upper Silesia analyzed the use of nature metaphors in Nazi antisemitism, as Jews protected by a League of Nations treaty were accused of living in a ‘nature preserve.’ His current project examines how railroads changed Central European landscapes, ecologies, and attitudes towards nature. At LSU he has taught a proseminar on energy sources and the environment in modern European history.
RCC Research Project: Railroads and the Central European Environment
Selected Publications:
- “Plebiscites and Postwar Legitimacy.” In Beyond Versailles: Sovereignty, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities after the Great War, edited by Roberta Pergher and Marcus Payk. Bloomington: 16-37. Indiana University Press, 2019.
- Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland: Upper Silesia, 1848-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
- “A Jewish ‘Nature Preserve’: League of Nations Minority Protections in Nazi Upper Silesia, 1933-1937.” Central European History 46, no. 1 (March 2013): 124-160.