Erik Grimmer-Solem is the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Professor in the College of Social Studies and professor of history at Wesleyan University. He received his PhD in economic and social history from Nuffield College, Oxford University and was a postdoctoral Harper Fellow at the University of Chicago before joining Wesleyan’s history department in 2002. He is the author of The Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform in Germany 1864-1894 and Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875-1919, along with more than 40 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews that have appeared in such journals as the American Historical Review, German History, History and Theory, Journal of World History, and several German publications.

Erik has received awards from prestigious organizations such as the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, as well as two distinguished teaching prizes from Wesleyan University. His research on the Wehrmacht’s involvement in the Holocaust was discussed widely in the German news media, including in the national newsweekly Der Spiegel. Its subsequent discussion in German parliament culminated in the renaming of a military base in 2015. He is currently writing a book entitled Ukrainian Barbarossa: The Crimes of the Wehrmacht and the Politics of Remembrance in Contemporary Germany.