Rate My Professor Geoffrey Penny

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.