Contact Information
Office: 203 Powers Hall
Phone: (989) 774-1090
Email: johns1ea@cmich.edu
Spotlight on Faculty Research
Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (2000).
What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (2005) (with Karl-Heinz Reuband).
Eric A. Johnson
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.
Major Publications
What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (Basic Books in New York; John Murray in London, 2005, as La Germania Sapeva by Mondadori in Italy, 2008; and soon forthcoming in a Chinese translation).
Social Control in Europe: 1800 to 2000 (The Ohio State University Press, 2004), co-edited with Clive Emsley and Pieter Spierenburg.
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.
The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country since the Middle Ages (University of Illinois Press, 1996), co-edited with Eric H. Monkkonen.
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.
"Urban and Rural Crime," special issue of Social Science History (1992), co-edited with Jan Sundin.
"Quantification and Criminal Justice History in International Perspective," special issue of Historical Social Research/Historische Sozialforschung (1990), editor.