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Eric Johnson joined the
CMU faculty in 1976 immediately after receiving his
Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. Over the years
he has taught a wide array of courses, primarily focused
on modern Europe, Germany, the Holocaust, and social
science methods and approaches to historical study. He
has held several visiting professorships of various
lengths. As part of the CMU exchange with Strathclyde
University he spent the 1988-1989 academic year teaching
in Glasgow, Scotland. Between 1989 and 1995 he was a
visiting professor at the Center for Historical Social
Research at the University of Cologne, mostly leading a
small research team working on terror in Nazi Germany.
From 1995-1996 he was in residence writing and
researching primarily at Princeton's Institute for
Advanced Study, and he held a similar appointment at the
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 1998-1999.
Research and Teaching Interests
Professor Johnson's research interests dovetail
considerably with his teaching. In the first years of
his career he focused primarily on the history of crime
and urbanization and justice. In the last couple of
decades he has written primarily on Nazi Germany and the
Holocaust. Presently he is beginning two new projects—a
smaller one on letter-writing between Germans and
Americans in the twentieth century and a larger one
(with Pieter Spierenburg of Erasmus University in
Rotterdam) on genocide, homicide and history in world
perspective.
Recent
Publications
Urbanization and Crime: Germany 1871-1914
(Cambridge University Press, 1995), winner of the Allan
Sharlin Award for the outstanding book published in the
field of Social Science History in 1995.
Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans
(Basic Books in New York and John Murray in London,
2000), translated into five European languages in
succeeding years including Dutch, German, French,
Italian, and Spanish.
What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life
in Nazi Germany (Basic Books in New York and John
Murray in London, 2005, and soon forthcoming in Italian
and Chinese translations).
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