Jennifer Jenkins (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1997) is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in Modern German History. Her interests include German and European history (19th and 20th centuries), Germany in the world, nationalism and memory, and transnational and global history. She is the author of Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Cornell University Press, 2003), Germany and the Great Game: The Reich and Iran in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury/I.B. Tauris, forthcoming 2021/2022) and Germany Among the Global Empires1815 to the Present, which she is writing for the Wiley-Blackwell series “A New History of Modern Europe.” She is co-editor of German Modernities from Wilhelm to Weimar: The Contest of Future (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
What I'm working on: Germany’s Orient, 1905-1979: Foreign Policy, Imperial Networks and Global Trade in the Twentieth Century
This project analyzes the “German Orient” as a twentieth-century political and economic project, which ran through government and civil society connections and took shape as a series of encounters between German institutions and nationalist and anti-colonial intellectuals across the Middle East and South Asia. Germany’s Orient expands the project of global history by foregrounding economic history and European/Asian connections, analyzing specifically Germany’s twentieth-century projects of economic expansion and their transnational actors.