Dr. Eric Kurlander, associate professor and chair of the History Department at Stetson University, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant for research and teaching in Freiburg, Germany, during the spring semester 2012, the U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board has announced.

From January through April, Kurlander will conduct research on his next book project, A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, at the Institute for East German Folklore, University of Freiburg Folklore Institute and the Federal Military Archives in Germany. Beginning in April, he will also teach in the History Department at the Freiburg University of Education and give public lectures on his research. Stetson has a study abroad program for students to attend the Freiburg University of Education for a semester or full academic year.

Kurlander, who earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University, teaches classes on modern German, European and World history. His last book, Living With Hitler (Yale University Press, 2009), examines the ways in which German liberals negotiated, resisted, and in some ways accommodated the Third Reich. Living With Hitler was featured in the Washington Post’s Short Stack book blog in 2009.

His first book, The Price of Exclusion: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism, 1898-1933 (Berghahn, 2006), describes how ethnic nationalist ideology gradually undermined the liberal parties in late-Imperial and Weimar Germany. His articles have appeared in Central European History, The Journal of Contemporary History, The Historian, The Bulletin of the German Historical Institute, Ethnopolitics, and European Review of History. Kurlander has held fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation; Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the German Historical Institute; the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD); the Krupp Foundation; and Harvard University’s Program for the Study of Germany and Europe.

In addition to A Supernatural History of the Third Reich, Kurlander is currently working on a textbook, The West in Question: Continuity and Change (forthcoming, Pearson-Longman).

Kurlander is one of about 1,100 U.S. faculty and professionals who will travel abroad through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program during the 2011-12 academic year. The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S.government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries.

The primary source of funding for the Fulbright Program is an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations and foundations in foreign countries and in the United States also provide direct and indirect support. Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. The program operates in more than 155 countries worldwide.

Since its establishment in 1946 under legislation introduced by the late U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, the Fulbright Program has given approximately 300,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.

More information is available at http://fulbright.state.gov.