Summary
James McSpadden is a historian of modern Europe with a particular interest in Central Europe, Germany, and the Low Countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His scholarship engages this history from a transnational perspective, tracing how people, ideas, and objects moved across Europe and around the world, with emphases on political culture, democracy, and the legacies of Nazi rule and the Holocaust.
His first book, A Continent of Colleagues: Backroom Politics and Interwar Democracy, comparatively explored the private lives of politicians and politics behind the scenes in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing on examples from Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Czechoslovakia and other countries, he argued that interwar parliamentary politics was unexpectedly collegial, inclusive and international. However, this backroom collegiality among elite political rivals prompted ordinary Europeans to grow disillusioned with interwar politics and turn to more radical, anti-democratic parties.
McSpadden is currently working on a second book project on the confiscation, redistribution, and global mobility of Nazi and Holocaust-era books. His research explores Nazi book looting and its aftermath, including the role of American librarians in bringing hundreds of thousands of these confiscated books to the United States after the Second World War. As museums, libraries and governments continue to grapple with provenance research and restitution claims tied to Nazi-era looting, McSpadden’s scholarship sheds light on the longer-term history of these confiscated books from 1933 to the present.
Committed to sharing scholarship with the wider community, McSpadden serves on the Governor’s Advisory Council on Education Related to the Holocaust. He has also held visiting and research fellowships at Yad Vashem, the University of Bonn and the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. His work has been supported by the American Historical Association, the American Council on Germany, the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Hoover Institution Library and Archives and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Research interests
- Modern German and Central European History
- Political Culture and New Methods in Political History
- Books and Cultural Artifacts in Wartime
- Provenance and Restitution of Holocaust-era Property
- Comparative History
Courses taught
- HIST 106: European Civilization
- HIST 367: The Holocaust in its European Setting
- HIST 436B: Legacies of the Holocaust
- HIST 464/664: Europe: 1914-Present
- CH 202: The Modern World
Education
- Ph.D., History, Harvard University, 2018
- M.A., Dutch Studies, Universiteit Leiden, 2010
- B.A., German Studies and Humanities, Yale University, 2008