Robert Beachy

   CURRENT BOOK PROJECTS:

1. Long Knives: Homosexuality in Nazi Germany (in preparation). 
   
   
2. Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (forthcoming, Alfred A. Knopf 2011). 
   
   
3. German Civil Wars: Nation Building and Historical Memory, 1756-1914, with James Retallack (forthcoming Oxford University Press). 
   

   BACKGROUND & RESEARCH INTERESTS:

My recent research focuses on the origins and development of sexual identity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany. My current project, Long Knives, focuses on homosexuality under the Nazi regime. I analyze the complex evolution of Nazi thought and policies toward homosexuality from open tolerance to persecution. The history of homosexuality under the Nazis illuminates the multi-faceted relationship of homosexuality to right-wing movements in contemporary Western political and social thought. My book on homosexuality in Berlin (forthcoming Alfred A. Knopf), situates the origins of modern male and female homosexual identity in Germany between the 1860s and the Weimar Republic.  It suggests that it was in Berlin, rather than in other European and American cities, that contemporary gay and lesbian identity first emerged and flourished. 

My work has received support from the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, and the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, as well as the German Academic Exchange Service and the American Philosophical Society.

    FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS & AWARDS:

    SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS:

1. Pious Pursuits:  German Moravians in the Atlantic World, ed. with Michele Gillespie (Berghahn 2007)
   
2. Who Ran the Cities? Elite and Urban Power Structures, 1700-2000, ed. with Ralf Roth (Ashgate 2007)
   
3. Women Business & Finance in Nineteenth Century Europe: Rethinking Separate Spheres, ed. with Beatrice Craig & Alastair Owens (Berg 2006)
   
4. The Soul of Commerce:  Credit, Property and Politics in Leipzig, 1750-1840 (Brill 2005)
   

1. "The German Invention of Homosexuality,"  forthcoming The Journal of Modern History, vol. 82 (Dec. 2010).
2. "Lodge Factionalism and Civic Notability in the Napoleonic Era," in Zeitschrift für Internationale Freimaurer-Forschung, no. 1 (2002): 41-55 (actual publication date 2004)
3. "Business was a Family Affair: Women of Commerce in Central Europe, 1650-1880," in Histoire Sociale-Social History, vol. XXXIV, 68 (2001): 307-330 (actual publication date 2003).
4. "Bankruptcy and Social Death: The Influence of Credit-Based Commerce on Cultural and Political Values," in Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit 4/4 (2000), 329-343; Reviewed by Christoph Albrecht:  "Vom Credo zum Kredit - Sozialer Tod: Der Bankrott im achtzehnten Jahrhundert" Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 August (2001), Section N: 5.
5. "Recasting Cosmopolitanism: German Freemasonry and Regional Identity in the Early Nineteenth Century," in Eighteenth Century Studies, 33:2 (Winter 1999-2000), 268-76.
6. "Local Protest and Territorial Reform: Public Debt and Constitutionalism in Early Nineteenth-Century Saxony," in German History 17/4 (1999), 470-87.
7. "Reforming Interregional Commerce: Leipzig Trade Fairs and Saxon Economic Recovery from the Thirty Years' War," in Central European History 32/4 (1999), 431-52.

1. "The Surveillance of Identity: Policing Homosexuals in Wilhelmine Berlin," forthcoming in After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies of Lust and Longing, ed. Scott Spector, Dagmar Herzog, Helmut Puff (Berghahn Books, 2010) 
   
2. "Dresden and Leipzig at War," forthcoming in War in an Age of Revolution: The Wars of American Independence and the French Revolution, 1776-1815, ed. Stig Foerster and Roger Chickering (Cambridge University Press) 
   
3. "Manuscript Missions in an Age of Print:  The Moravian 'Gemein Nachrichten' in the Atlantic World," in Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World, ed. Gillespie and Beachy (Berghahn, 2007).
   
4. "Profit and Propriety: Sophie Henschel and Gender Management in the German Locomotive Industry," in Women in Business and Finance in Nineteenth Century Europe: Rethinking Separate Spheres, ed. Beachy, Owens, Craig (Berg Press, 2005).
5. "Masonic Fraternalism and the Construction of Gender in Enlightenment Europe," forthcoming in Fraternal Organisations and the Structuring of Gender Roles in Europe, 1300-2000, ed. Maire Cross, Andrew Prescott (Ashgate, 2005)
   
6. "The Eclipse of Usury:  Bankruptcy and Business Morality in Eighteenth-Century Germany," in Ways of Knowing: Early Modern German Studies, ed. Mary Lindemann (Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004), 171-190 
   
7. "Women Without Gender: Commerce, Exchange Codes, and the Erosion of Female Guardianship in Germany, 1680-1830," in Family Welfare: Gender, Property and Inheritance since the Seventeenth Century, ed. David R. Green, Alastair Owens (Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 2004).
8. "Club Culture and Social Authority: Freemasonry in Leipzig, 1741-1830," in The Paradoxes of Civil Society, ed. Frank Trentmann (New York, Berghahn Books, 2000; reprint 2003), 157-75.
9. "Fernhandel und Krämergeist: Die Leipziger Handelsdeputierten und die Einführung der sächsischen Wechselordnung, 1681," in Leipzigs Messen 1497 bis 1997, ed. Hartmut Zwahr, 2 vols. (Weimar/Cologne/Vienna, Böhlau Verlag, 1999), 1: 135-147
   
   

  LINKS

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
National Humanities Center