Adam Blackler

Dr. Adam A. Blackler is an associate professor of history at the University of Wyoming. He is a historian of modern Germany and southern Africa, whose research emphasizes the transnational dimensions of imperial occupation and colonial violence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His scholarly interests also include the political and social dynamics of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the interdisciplinary fields of holocaust & genocide Studies and international human rights. Dr. Blackler has held invited positions as a visiting professor in the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute at Freie Universität (Berlin, Germany) and at the Ernst-Abbe-Hochschule (Jena, Germany). He held these positions as part of a year-long sabbatical in 2024-2025, when he conducted extensive archival research in Germany, Namibia, and South Africa.

 

His scholarship has appeared in distinguished peer-reviewed journals, university presses, and edited collections since 2017. Dr. Blackler published his first book monograph, entitled An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa, with Pennsylvania State University Press’s series “Germans Beyond Europe” in 2022. PSUP released it in paperback in 2023. Dr. Blackler is presently writing a second book-length monograph, entitled Scrambling Back to Southwest Africa: False Victimhood and Empire in Weimar Germany. In addition, he is writing a new short analysis of Viktor Klemperer and his personal confrontations with fascist violence during the Third Reich, entitled I Shall Bear Witness—Viktor Klemperer in His Time, and Ours. Numerous national and international organizations have generously funded his research, including the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD), United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Holocaust Educational Foundation (HEF), Flittie Sabbatical Award, Center for Global Studies and Engagement (CGS), College of Arts and Sciences, and the Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research (WIHR). Dr. Blackler received the University of Wyoming’s Extraordinary Merit in Research Award in 2022.

 

Dr. Blackler offers a wide range of survey, upper division, online, study abroad, and graduate courses in modern European and world history. Course topics include European colonialism, nationalism and transnationalism, comparative and opposing fascism, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, Weimar Germany, and human rights and crimes against humanity. Several of his MA advisees accepted funded positions in prestigious Ph.D. programs, including UNC-Chapel Hill, University of Kansas, and Boston College. In 2024, he received both the Extraordinary Merit in Teaching Award and John “Jack” P. Ellbogen Meritorious Classroom Teaching Award.

 

Select Publications:

Refereed Books

An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa. University Park, Pennsylvania: Max Kade Research Institute, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022. Paperback: 2023

 

Refereed Journal Articles

“From Boondoggle to Settlement Colony: Hendrik Witbooi and the Evolution of Germany’s Imperial Project in Southwest Africa, 1884-1894” Central European History 50, no. 4 (27 December 2017): 449-470.

 

Volume Editor

After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies. Oxford: Peter Lang Press, 2020, edited and introduced with Sara Pugach and David Pizzo.

 

Book Chapters

“Popularizing the Nation: Colonial Literature and the Imperial Imagination,” Race Theory in Enlightenment Anthropology: The Conceptual Legacy, eds. Daniel Purdy and Robert Bernasconi. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

 

“German Africa,” Slavery, Colonialism, and Reparations, eds. Adekeye Adebajo and Anita Montoute. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, forthcoming.

 

“Consequences: Settler-Colonialism and Its Eliminatory Repercussions in the Nineteenth Century.” A Cultural History of Genocide: The Long Nineteenth Century. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2021: 141-163.

 

“The Language of Empire: Aspiring Colonists and the Heimat Ideal in Imperial Germany.” After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and its Legacies. Oxford: Peter Lang Press, 2020: 59-73.

 

“The Imperialist Imagination 20 years on: The Historiographical Shift Toward a Global Germany.” After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies. Oxford: Peter Lang Press, 2020: 17-56.

 

Refereed Digital Articles

“After ‘Uprising’: Child Separation and Racial Apartheid in German Southwest Africa,” Age of Revolutions, 30 March 2020, 1-7.

 

Digital Articles

“I Shall Bear Witness: Victor Klemperer in His Time, and Ours.” The New Fascism Syllabus, 8 February 2025; Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 30 January 2025.

 

“‘Not typical news for Wyoming’: A Digital History Project for the COVID-19 Era.” The German Studies Collaboratory: Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, 28 August 2020.

 

“The Reichstag Fire and the Destruction of Liberal Democracy.” Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. University of Minnesota, 28 July 2020.

 

“German Colonists also Separated Children from their Parents.” Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. University of Minnesota, 21 August 2019.

 

“From ‘Erotic Fantasies’ to Colonial Genocide: The Evolution of German Imperial Policy in Southwest Africa after 1884.” Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. University of Minnesota, 21 May 2018.

 

“‘A Character Who Makes History’: Hendrik Witbooi and the Evolution of German Imperial Policy in Namibia.” Cambridge Core. Cambridge University Press, 3 March 2018.

 

“Interactive Approaches to Teaching Twentieth-Century German History.” AHA Today. American Historical Society, 20 November 2017.

 

“White Supremacy on Campus: An Ahistorical Campaign of Racial Prejudice.” Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. University of Minnesota, 13 March 2017.

 

“Genocide in German Southwest Africa: German Leaders Agree with the Historians— Finally.” Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. University of Minnesota, September 2016.