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Dr. Steigmann-Gall Photo
 Steigmann-Gall

Richard Steigmann-Gall is Associate Professor of History and the Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Kent State University.  He received his BA in 1989 and MA in 1992 from the University of Michigan, and his PhD in 1999 from the University of Toronto.  His academic interests concern the cultural and religious dimensions of German National Socialism, specifically the cohort of Nazis who believed in “positive Christianity” and the struggles they waged with Nazism’s neo-pagans for religious dominance in the Third Reich.  His articles have appeared in the journals German History, Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte, Social History, Central European History, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, and The Journal of Contemporary History. His book, The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919-1945, came out in 2003 through Cambridge University Press, with foreign language translations out or forthcoming in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Greek.  Holy Reich has been reviewed broadly in the popular and academic press, has been the subject of interviews in The Boston Globe and with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and is the subject of a symposium of international scholars in the Journal of Contemporary History.

His current scholarly itinerary includes contributions to several edited volumes, one on “political religion” theory published in Germany through Wallstein Verlag, and another on racial and religious antisemitism published through Indiana University Press.  He is also contributing the chapter on “Religion and the Churches” to the forthcoming Oxford Short History of Germany: The Third Reich, and the chapter on Germany to the forthcoming Clerical Fascism volume through Routledge.  He has presented his research at several academic and public venues in North America and Europe, most recently at the Modern European Research Seminar in the Faculty of History at Cambridge University.

In his current book project, tentatively titled “Mutability and Constructions of Race in the Third Reich,” Steigmann-Gall will explore the ways in which Nazis attempted to gauge the racial affiliation of those who, in the Nazi imagination, were neither German nor Jewish.  He is particularly interested in how the Nazis determined racial identity for so-called “half-castes” of mixed European and non-European ancestry, and the ways in which the Nazis acknowledged that cultural categories guided their racial thinking.  In support of his research he has earned grants and awards from the Social Science and Research Council of Canada, the Max-Planck Institut für Geschichte in Germany, the Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism in Israel, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as from the Office of Research and Graduate Study at Kent State University.

At universities in the United States and Canada, he has taught a variety of courses relating to different aspects of modern European and Jewish history, including lecture courses on “Germany since 1870,” “Modern Europe, 1890-1945,” and “The Holocaust,” as well as undergraduate and graduate colloquia on topics such as “Comparative Fascism,” and “Religion and Society in the Modern West.”  He won the Distinguished Teaching Award from the College of Arts and Sciences at Kent State in 2004, and has been nominated an additional three times.