John Gillespie
Election
Position
Name
John Gillespie
Candidate statement
John Gillespie (MA, Middle Tennessee State University, 2018) is a fifth-year PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Gillespie studies twentieth-century German and Czech societies, and his dissertation explores the importance of beer to identity formation and state policies in the postwar Germanys and Czechoslovakia. He authored “Cold (Beer) War: The German Volksgetränk in East German Rhetoric (1945-1971)” in Food, Culture and Identity in Germany’s Century of War (2019) and “Imbibing the Future: Alcohol Moderation and Modernity in 1960s and 1970s East German Broadcast Media and Film” in Contemporary European History (2022). Gillespie has received research grants from the DAAD, MTSU, Vanderbilt University, and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Additionally, he won the Southern Historical Association’s Snell
Memorial Prize for the best graduate paper in European History in 2019. Gillespie has been a GSA member since 2019, presented at the 2020 virtual conference, and will present again in 2022. He also served as Vice President and President of Vanderbilt’s Graduate History Association from 2019 to 2021. If elected, Gillespie will advocate for initiatives to improve the market-readiness and public outreach of GSA student members and work to further promote equity and inclusivity in the organization.
Memorial Prize for the best graduate paper in European History in 2019. Gillespie has been a GSA member since 2019, presented at the 2020 virtual conference, and will present again in 2022. He also served as Vice President and President of Vanderbilt’s Graduate History Association from 2019 to 2021. If elected, Gillespie will advocate for initiatives to improve the market-readiness and public outreach of GSA student members and work to further promote equity and inclusivity in the organization.