Rate My Professor Geoffrey Penny

Glenn Penny is Professor and Henry J. Bruman Chair in German History in the Department of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1999, with a dissertation titled “Cosmopolitan Visions and Municipal Displays: Museums, Markets, and the Ethnographic Project in Germany, 1868-1914,” which received the Fritz Stern Prize from the German Historical Institute, Washington D.C. He also holds an M.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1991 and a B.A. from the same university in 1987. Penny's career trajectory includes serving as Professor of History at the University of Iowa from 2014 to 2022, Associate Professor from 2006 to 2014, and Assistant Professor from 2003 to 2006. Prior roles encompass Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri–Kansas City from 2000 to 2003 and James Bryant Conant Fellow at Harvard University's Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies from 1999 to 2000. Currently, he holds the position of Distinguished Visiting Professor of Cultural Sciences at Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen during summer semesters 2021–2023.

His research specializations encompass histories of belonging, knowledge, and migration involving German speakers and communities across the globe from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Penny investigates polycentric German history that de-emphasizes the nation-state, focusing on transcultural spaces, ethnographic museums, and entanglements between Europeans and non-Europeans. Ongoing projects examine belonging in the southern German borderlands and the practice of anthropology in museums. Major publications include German History Unbound: 1750s to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2022), In Humboldt’s Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology (Princeton University Press, 2021), Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), and Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). He co-edited Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) and Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (University of Michigan Press, 2003). Penny has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2021–2022), Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Fellowship (2012–2014), DAAD Book Award (2015), and Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Humanities Research Award (2015). His contributions have profoundly impacted understandings of global entanglements in German history and the history of anthropology.