Andrew Stuart Bergerson

Biography

Professor Andrew Stuart Bergerson (“Drew”) is an historian of modern Germany at the University of Missouri-Kansas City with interest in the history of everyday life (Alltagsgeschichte), ethnographic/oral history, interdisciplinary German studies, digital and public humanities, and collaborative research and writing. He teaches a range of courses on modern German, modern European, and modern global history. He is an affiliate faculty member with the Center for Digital and Public Humanities and director of the German Studies minor.

Born in New York, Drew earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1998 and has taught in France, Germany, and Taiwan. He was awarded the UMKC Trustees' Faculty Scholar Award for Research in 2005 and the Presidential Faculty Award for Cross-Cultural Engagement in 2021. Along with many articles of scholarly non-fiction, he wrote Ordinary Germans in Extraordinary Times (2004), updated and translated into German as Nationalsozialismus in alltäglichen Interaktionen (2019). He led a collaborative team of four scholars in cowriting The Happy Burden of History (2011) and twenty-four in the case of Ruptures in the Everyday (2017). From 2017 to 2021, he worked with colleagues and students from Austria, Germany, Poland, and the United States in on virtual, interuniversity graduate research seminars researching and writing the history of German Migration to Missouri, resulting in two more edited collections: German Migration to Missouri (2019), and From Langenbrück to Kansas City (2021). Since 2011, he has served as co-PI for “citizen science” projects focusing on the letters of ordinary German couples before, during, and after the Second World War. Details can be found at Alltag-im-Krieg.de.

Courses Taught

Undergraduate

• GECRT-AH 101 - Making Meaning in a Changing World: The Holocaust 
• GECUE 201 – Civic and Urban Engagement in Public History
• HISTORY 301 – Historiography and Method: Imperial and Colonial History
• HISTORY 430R - World War I Throught Its Artifacts 
• HISTORY 436WI - Comparative Histories of Modern Germany 
• HISTORY 437WI - Holocaust and Comparative Genocides 

Graduate

• HISTORY 5536 - Comparative Histories of Modern Germany 
• HISTORY 5581GR - Introduction to Graduate Studies 
• HISTORY 5586GR - Colloquium in World History: Holocaust and Genocide Studies 
• HISTORY 5587R - Research Seminar 

Visiting Appointments

Department of History, National Taipei University, Sanxia, Taiwan (2015)
Institute für Europäische Ethnologie, Universität Wien, Austria (2015)
Institute des Sciences sociales du Politique, L’Université Paris X–Ouest Nanterre La Défense, France (2015)
Institute für Geschichte, Stiftung Universität Hildesheim, Germany (2006, 2009)
Department of History, Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, PA (1998-99)

Student Resources

Instructional Videos (UMKC only): Decoding the Old German Scripts: Lower Case, Upper Case
Principles for Scholarly Discourse: Statement of Principles