Skip to main content

Willeke Sandler

Department Chair, Associate Professor
Willeke Sandler

Curriculm Vitaeu

Biography

Willeke Sandler is a historian of modern Germany. She graduated with a B.A. in History from New York University and a M.A. in History with a Certificate in Historical Agencies and Administration from Northeastern University, before receiving her Ph.D. in History from Duke University. Her research interests include public culture and expressions of race and nationalism in Nazi Germany and in twentieth-century Germany more broadly, imperialism in European culture, and the relationship between visual culture, public history, and nationalism. Her research has been published in Central European History and the Journal of Women’s History

Her first book, Empire in the Heimat: Colonialism and Public Culture in the Third Reich (Oxford University Press, 2018), examines the public activities of colonial lobbying organizations in Nazi Germany and their efforts to both keep alive the memory of Germany’s overseas empire (lost in 1919 through the Treaty of Versailles) and to agitate for the reclamation of these territories. Empire in the Heimat tells the paradoxical story of colonialists’ construction of a German national character driven by overseas imperialism despite the absence of a colonial reality.

Her current project investigates German settlement in their former colony of German East Africa (after 1919 the British Mandate of Tanganyika) in the interwar period.

Dr. Sandler is the internship coordinator for the History Department. If you are interested in completing an internship for credit, see the criteria on the department website or send Dr. Sandler an email.

Courses

  • HS 100 Encountering the Past
  • HS 101 The Making of the Modern World: Europe
  • HS 318 Creation of Modern Germany, 1770-1992
  • HS 319 Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
  • HS 417D Germans in Africa, Africans in Germany
  • HS 431 Introduction to Public History
  • HS 474 Holocaust Memory in Germany and America

Areas of Specialization

  • Modern Germany
  • Modern Europe
  • Imperialism
  • Nationalism
  • Public history