Robert Beachy

Robert Beachy

Fellow: Awarded 2009
Field of Study: German and East European History

Competition: US & Canada

Goucher College

Born in Puerto Rico, Robert Moses Beachy received his doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1998. His work, Gay Berlin (Knopf, 2011), situates the origins of modern homosexual identity in debates about national unification, politics, and masculinity in Germany from the 1860s through the 1920s. It suggests that it was in Berlin, rather than in other European and American metropolises, that contemporary gay identity first emerged and flourished. His current project, Long Knives, focuses on homosexuality under the Nazi regime and analyzes the complex evolution of Nazi policies toward homosexuality from open toleration to persecution.

Mr. Beachy also has written extensively about modern and early-modern European history. His publications include German Civil Wars: Nation Building and Historical Memory, 1756-1914, co-authored with James Retallack (forthcoming, Oxford UP), and The Soul of Commerce: Credit, Property and Politics in Leipzig, 1750-1840 (Brill, 2005). His edited collections include Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World, co-edited with Michele Gillespie (Berghahn, 2007); Who Ruled the Cities? Elite and Urban Power Structures, 1750-1940, co-edited with Ralf Roth (Ashgate, 2007); and Women in Business and Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Rethinking Separate Spheres, co-edited with Alastair Owens and Beatrice Craig (Berg, 2006). He is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters.

Robert Beachy has received previous fellowships from 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 support from the German Academic Exchange Service and the American Philosophical Society.

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