UW History Professor Receives Ellbogen Meritorious Classroom Teaching Award

University of Wyoming Department of History Associate Professor Adam Blackler is one of the best classroom teachers and graduate advisers UW Vice Provost for Global Engagement Isadora Helfgott has ever seen.

“As a teacher, Adam is enthusiastic and dynamic, an accomplished and popular teacher who draws students to the history major,” Helfgott says. “His course evaluations are exemplary, which is not surprising, because students regularly talk about how much they enjoy his courses and his teaching style.”

Blackler is one of four recipients of the 2024 John P. Ellbogen Meritorious Classroom Teaching Award at UW. The award was established in 1977 by businessman John P. “Jack” Ellbogen to “foster, encourage and reward excellence in classroom teaching at UW.”

“Dr. Blackler is impressively committed to the work he does in the classroom, and his passion for encouraging students to think critically about content while excitedly engaging with history cannot be matched,” one of his students wrote. “I believe that Dr. Blackler’s teaching and leadership skills associated with study-abroad courses are invaluable assets to this university and its students.”

Blackler is a historian of modern Germany and southern Africa whose research emphasizes the transnational dimensions of imperial occupation and settler-colonial violence in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“It is a tremendous honor to receive the Ellbogen Meritorious Classroom Teaching Award,” Blackler says. “For me, the most exciting part of being a historian is interacting with people. My belief that we all have something to teach and something to learn has inspired me to treat the classroom as a space that fosters a two-way flow of knowledge. I always endeavor to acknowledge the ideas and perspectives that students bring to class while also encouraging them to challenge their assumptions and connect their larger pursuits with the outside world.”

His scholarly and teaching interests also include the political and social dynamics of Germany’s Weimar Republic and the interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust and genocide studies, as well as international human rights.

His first book monograph, titled “An Imperial Homeland: Forging German Identity in Southwest Africa,” appeared in 2022 in the Pennsylvania State University Press series “Germans Beyond Europe” sponsored by the Max Kade Research Institute.

His other recent publications include a co-edited anthology, titled “After the Imperialist Imagination: Two Decades of Research on Global Germany and Its Legacies,” and a chapter in the multivolume collection “A Cultural History of Genocide.”

Currently, he is researching a second book-length project, titled “‘We remain loyal to the Fatherland!’: Outposts of Empire in Weimar Germany.”

Blackler offers a wide range of survey, upper-division, capstone, online, study-abroad and graduate courses in modern European and world history. Course topics include European colonialism, nationalism and transnationalism; comparative fascism and genocide; Nazi Germany and the Holocaust; Weimar Germany; and human rights and crimes against humanity.

Blackler earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; a master’s degree in history from UW; and a bachelor’s degree in history and political science from Carroll College in Helena, Mont.

“In many ways, this Ellbogen Teaching Award says far more about all of my students than anything I have done,” he says. “They have actively engaged with and sought to learn from the difficult and unsettling events, movements and mass violence that construct much of our history. As both a citizen and scholar, I can ask for nothing more of the next generation.”