Brian Vick

Brian Vick, Assistant Professor (Ph.D., Yale University, 1997; A.B., Stanford University, 1992).  Modern Germany and Central Europe in the long nineteenth century; modern political and intellectual-cultural history.  I have taught at Bard College, Yale, Stanford, the University of Sheffield in England, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.  My published work has focused on questions of nationalism, liberalism, historicism, and ideas of race, in several articles and in my first book, Defining Germany The 1848 Frankfurt Parliamentarians and National Identity  (Harvard University Press, 2002).

My current research explores problems of European culture and political culture at the Congress of Vienna, including the political engagement of women, the development of liberal and conservative politics, and the role of religious revival.  This work also sounds the cultural and political meanings of the celebratory spectacle and display surrounding the defeat of Napoleon and the return of peace at the close of the Napoleonic wars.  The project will result in a new book and a pair of articles which taken together will help to reassess the nature and direction of European culture and political culture in their period of transition between the revolutionary era and the nineteenth century.  In addition, I have recently completed a substantial article investigating campaigns for legal reform by Germanist lawyers and legal scholars in the mid-nineteenth century, in which issues of gender, ideology, and political culture also feature centrally.  This article is forthcoming in The Journal of Modern History. 

Curriculum Vitae