My dissertation research into Wilhelm Groener was initially a social and cultural history of the Imperial German officer corps on the eve of World War One. The more I learned about Groener’s work, though, the more important military culture and expertise became in their own right. Thus, my dissertation deals with officering and war-planning in two distinct sections.

A powerful need to earn a living keeps coming between me and the further inquiry needed to bring these two levels of analysis together, but I continue to be interested in questions of culture, expertise, and war, on the one hand, and the complicated social operations of cognition, on the other. Meanwhile, I have made my dissertation available on the open web, starting with the Internet Archive and then adding it to Humanities Commons.

Thesis and Publications

“Wilhelm Groener, Officering, and the Schlieffen Plan” (PhD diss, Georgetown University, 2006).

“Bürgerliche und adlige Krieger: Zum Verhältnis zwischen sozialer Herkunft und Berufskultur im wilhelminischen Offizierkorps,” in Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschland II: Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Heinz Reif (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 25–63.

“Particularistic Traditions in a National Profession: Reflections on the Wilhelmine Army Officer Corps,” in Newsletter des Arbeitskreis Militärgeschichte e.V. 11 (2/2000): 16–18.

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