Brent Maner
Associate Professor
Office: 204A Calvin Hall
Email: maner@k-state.edu
My name is Brent Maner, and I am a specialist in modern German history. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 2001. My interest in European history began during a family vacation to England and Scotland when I was ten years old, and I returned to Europe during a college year abroad in Vienna, Austria and as a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar in Germany a few years after that. I hope my courses inspire a greater interest in Europe among Kansas State students and perhaps even lead some to travel outside the United States. Encounters with other cultures provide a great way to learn about history and to sample the diversity of the human experience.
My first book explored the development of archaeology in Germany since the eighteenth century. I studied what antiquarians and archaeologists thought about "ancient Germans" and how their ideas interacted with several of the big questions of modern German history: the rise of nationalism, the persistence of regional identities, concepts of ethnicity and race, and the development of anthropology. I'm also very interested in the history of stock exchanges and how they were a dynamic part of the nineteenth-century life in European cities (especially Berlin, Vienna, Paris, and London). I'm working on several aspects of this topic, including newspaper coverage of the stock market, "how to" manuals for new investors, and the ways that the stock exchange became a target of political debate in the German Empire. My other interests include historical novels of the nineteenth century, the public understanding of the Nazi dictatorship and the Holocaust, and changes in Europe since 1989.
Select Publications
Germany's Ancient Pasts: Archaeology and Historical Interpretation since 1700. Chicago, 2018.
Entry on "Rudolf Virchow" in Encyclopedia of Europe: 1789-1914, ed. John Merriman and Jay Winter. New York, 2006.
"Die Entdeckung der Vor- und Frühgeschichte: Begegnungen mit der Vorzeit durch das Märkische Provinzialmuseum." (The discovery of prehistory: Encountering the ancient past at the Märkisches Museum.) In Renaissance der Kulturgeschichte (The Renaissance of Cultural History), ed. Alexis Joachimides and Sven Kuhrau, 166-180. Dresden and Basel, 2001.
Courses Taught
I teach the following undergraduate classes on a regular basis: Nazi Germany and the Holocaust and the second half of the Western Civilization sequence. I also offer (less frequently): Nineteenth-Century Europe, History of the Soviet Union, and Europe since 1945. At the graduate level, I teach surveys of modern European history, a topics class devoted to nationalism, and historiography.
Additional Information
Great links for students interested in European history:
International section of the New York Times
German history in documents and images (German Historical Institute)
The Deutsche Welle (something like a German BBC; there is an English version)