Between February 17 and February 24, 2025, the Central European History will hold its annual elections to fill the open positions on its Executive Board, namely the positions of Vice President Elect (1) and At-Large Member (1). Ballots wil be sent to all those who are active members of the Society as of February 14, 2025. 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 the position of Vice President Elect
Yair Mintzker (Princeton)
Yair Mintzker is Behrman Professor in the Humanities and professor of history at Princeton University. He is a specialist in the history of the German Sattelzeit, roughly the time period between 1750-1850. Mintzker’s latest monograph, The Many Deaths of Jew Süss (Princeton UP, 2017) is a retelling of the trial and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer, the notorious “Jew Süss.” The book was translated into German and Hebrew, and won the National Jewish Book Award in History (2018). Mintzker’s first book, The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 (Cambridge UP, 2012) won the Urban History Association’s best book prize (2014). Mintzker is the recipient of many prizes, including the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize (2010), as well as fellowships from the DAAD, the Whiting Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Mintzker’s next book, I, Ahasverus, is a new history of the legend of the Wandering Jew from its inception in an anonymous pamphlet in 1602 down to the present day. It is scheduled to come out with Princeton UP later this year.
George Williamson (Florida State)
George Williamson is an Associate Professor of History at Florida State University. He completed his AB in Religious Studies at Brown University in 1987 and his PhD in History at Yale University in 1996. He taught from 1997 to 2010 at the University of Alabama before moving to F.S.U. in 2010. He has published widely in the field of German cultural and intellectual history during the long nineteenth century. His first book, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004. His article, “What Killed August von Kotzebue? The Temptations of Virtue and the Political Theology of German Nationalism, 1789-1819” (2000), received the CEHS prize for best article published in 1999-2000. His article, “‘Thought Is in Itself a Dangerous Operation’”: The Campaign Against ‘Revolutionary Machinations’ in Germany, 1819–1828” (2015), received the DAAD Prize for best History article published in German Studies Review in 2014-2015. He has served on the Board of Editors of Central European History and the Board of Editors of the GSA’s Spektrum Book Series. He is currently completing a book manuscript entitled The Age of Kotzebue: Theater, Nation, and Assassination, 1789-1819.
Candidates for the position of At-Large Member
Heikki Lempa (Moravian University)
Heikki Lempa is Professor of Modern European History at Moravian University where he teaches classes on German and European history, history of the body, history of emotions, and the Holocaust. He recently launched a program in the Health Humanities with colleagues from the English and Religion Studies departments. He is author of three books. Bildung der Triebe (1993) is a study of an eighteenth-century educational movement centered in the German lands but networked European wide. Beyond the Gymnasium (2007) draws on archival materials from Vienna, Tübingen, Leipzig, Mannheim, Hamburg, and Munich and traces the history of the German body in dance, gymnastics, dietetics, and walking, 1750 -1850. Spaces of Honor (2021) is an investigation of how German honor practices in education, at spas, urban spaces, and labor movement were intertwined with the formation of civil society from 1700 to 1914. His current book project, The Bodies of the Others, attempts to situate German bodies in a global context in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These books and projects reflect his interests in the histories of education, the body, and emotions from the late seventeenth into the early twentieth centuries. His work has been supported by organizations including the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, the Herzog August Bibliothek (Wolfenbüttel), and the DAAD. He has worked at the German Studies Association to launch, among others, the Emotion Studies Network and the Body Studies Network.
Jesse Spohnholz (Washington State)
Jesse Spohnholz is Professor of History at Washington State University. His research focuses on social practices of toleration in Reformation-era Germany and the Netherlands, experiences of refugees during Europe’s Age of Religious Wars, and historical memory of the Reformation. His books include The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (University of Delaware Press, 2011), The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never Was and the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Ruptured Lives: Refugee Crises in Historical Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2020), and (with Mirjam van Veen) Dutch Reformed Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire, c.1550–1620: A Reformation of Refugees (University of Rochester Press, 2024). He has also co-edited Archeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017 (Berghahn, 2017) and Exile and Religious Identity, 1500–1700 (Pickering & Chatto, 2014). His research has received awards from the German Studies Association/DAAD, the German Historical Institute, the Sixteenth Century Society, and the American Society of Church History and he has received major awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Dutch Research Council. He is also Director of the History for the 21st Century project of the World History Association.