Daniel Brückenhaus is a historian of Europe and the European colonial empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2011 and joined the Beloit faculty in 2012.
At Beloit, Daniel teaches a wide range of courses on the history of Europe and the European colonial empires from the late eighteenth century to the present. His courses include “Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Colonialism,” “Nazi Germany: History and Film,” “Europe and the Modern World, 1789-1945,” “Modern African History,” “Big Brother is Watching You: Europe in the Age of Government Surveillance,” “Worlds of Stone: Modern Urban History,” “Magic Mountains and Faustian Bargains: German History Seen Through The Eyes of Thomas Mann and his Family,” “History of Fascism,” “Thinking Through Europe’s History: History and Theory, 1789-Present,” and “History of Emotions in Modern Europe.”
Daniel’s research interests are focused on the history of global anti-imperialism, the history of government surveillance, and the history of emotions in the modern period.
His current book project demonstrates the power of laughter, ridicule and satire in challenging modern imperialism, focusing on the German, British and French colonial empires between 1880 and 1970. The project analyzes the use of humor by prominent anti-colonial leaders such as Frantz Fanon, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh, as well as by grassroots members of anti-colonial movements in Africa, Asia and the European metropoles. It argues that anti-colonial laughter was of great importance in resisting imperialism, both in day-to-day interactions between colonizers and colonized, and among activists working towards the process of global decolonization after World War II.
Book:
Daniel Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017; paperback edition 2020)
Articles:
“Anticolonial Comedy: Humor among Vietnamese Activists in France, 1909-1923,” Yearbook of Transnational History 4 (2021), pp. 135-161.
“British Passport Restrictions, the League Against Imperialism, and the Problem of Liberal Democracy,” in: Michele Louro et al. (eds.), The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020), pp. 187-210.
“Challenging Imperialism Across Borders: Recent Studies of Twentieth-Century Internationalist Networks against Empire,” Contemporary European History 29 (2020), pp. 104-115.
Daniel Brückenhaus, “Imperial Fears and Transnational Policing in Europe: The ‘German Problem’ and the British and French Surveillance of Anti-Colonialists in Exile,” in: Harald Fischer-Tiné (ed.), Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings: Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies) (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 225-257.
Daniel Brückenhaus, “Identifying Colonial Subjects: Fingerprinting in British Kenya, 1900-1960,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 42 (2016), pp. 60-85.
Daniel Brückenhaus, ”The Origins of Trans-Imperial Policing: British-French Government Cooperation in the Surveillance of Anti-Colonialists in Europe, 1905-1925,” in: Volker Barth and Roland Cvetkovski (eds.), Imperial Co-operation and Transfer,1870-1930 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 171-193.
Daniel Brückenhaus, “Radicalism,” in: Gita Dharampal-Frick et al. (eds.), Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 226-228.
Ute Frevert, Daniel Brückenhaus et al., Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), including Daniel Brückenhaus, “Ralph’s Compassion,” on empire and childhood emotions in modern Western Europe, pp. 74-93.
Daniel Brückenhaus, “‘Every stranger must be suspected’: Trust Relationships and the Surveillance of Anti-Colonialists in Early Twentieth-Century Western Europe,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 36 (2010), pp. 523-566.
Daniel Brückenhaus, “L’état de la question: La mémoire commune européenne” [“The State of the Question: A Common European Memory”], in: Bronislaw Geremek and Robert Picht (eds.), Visions d’Europe (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2007), pp. 407-417.
