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Dr. Bergerson completed his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago focusing on modern German history. He served for one year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Franklin & Marshall College before joining the history department of the University of Missouri–Kansas City in 1999. An historian of everyday life, Bergerson’s research focuses on the historical impact of everyday ways of being, believing, and behaving. Much of his research focuses on a longstanding research engagement in Hildesheim, a provincial town in Lower Saxony. His first book, Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times (2004) focused on the role of ordinary Hildesheimers in the Nazi revolution. A German translation is forthcoming in 2012 from Gerstenberg Verlag under the title: Entscheidung im Alltag. His second book, The Happy Burden of History (2011), which he coauthored with K. Scott Baker, Clancy Martin, and Steve Ostovich, explores the meaning and possibilities for historical responsibility in light of examples and counterexamples from modern German life and letters. In a new project, he leads (together with Leo Schmieding) a collective of some 30 scholars who are coauthoring a new study, The Contours of the Everyday: Views of Modern Germany from the Ground. This new monograph seeks to tell integrated stories about the German everyday—focusing on extra/ordinary, self, family, institutions, memories, antisemitism, violence, and space—that retains the fragmentary quality of microhistory but draws meaningful connections to macrohistory. His other new project, http://www.trugundschein.org/, broadcasts, on the radio and the web, the letters of a man and a woman during the Second World War as a vehicle for a web-based, crowd sourced history of everyday life. It opens the doors of microhistory to a world-wide audience in the tradition of public history. Comment on the letters, write scholarship on our wikis, and follow us on twitter (https://twitter.com/HildeundRoland). |
