Jonathan R. Zatlin

Candidate statement

Jonathan R. Zatlin (Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 2000) is Associate Professor of History at Boston University, where he also served as Associate Director of Kilachand Honors College (2012-2016). His initial work explored the history of German communism, focusing on the social construction of value in East Germany to understand German unification. Out of that research emerged The Currency of Socialism. Money and Political Culture in East Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany (Duke University Press, 2007), co-edited with Jonathan Wiesen and Pamela Swett, and over two dozen book chapters and articles in journals such as Central European History, German History, German Politics and Society, American Historical Review, Contemporary European History, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, and Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft. More recently, he has turned from the category of class to the problem of race in German history. He co-edited Dispossession: Plundering German Jewry, 1933-1953 (University of Michigan Press, 2020) with Christoph Kreutzmüller and is currently completing his second monograph, German Fantasies of Jewish Wealth, 1790-1990 (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). He was awarded the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize in 2001, the Hans Rosenberg Article Prize in 2011, and the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies in 2011. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the DAAD, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. He has also been active in professional organizations related to German history, serving on the executive board of the Central European History Society (2013-2016), the editorial board of Central European History (2014-2017), and the academic advisory board of the Leo Baeck Institute-New York (2016-present). He has been a regular attendee at GSA meetings since grad school, and in 2019 served on the GSA Program Committee.