Andrew Kless

Education

• PhD: History, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 2020
• MA: History, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 2016
• MA: History, Maxwell School of Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, 2010
• BA: History and Political Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, 2008

Biography

I am an Assistant Professor of History and Global Studies and Director of AU’s Global Studies program. I offer courses in contemporary Europe, Asia, and Africa and co-lead a yearly (Winter) Allen Term study abroad program to Germany.

Travel and service inform my teaching and desire to help students think globally. I have been to 44 countries on five continents and lived abroad for more than three years nonconsecutively in Poland, Germany, and France. As an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, I deployed to northern Afghanistan in 2013-2014, serving as a NATO liaison officer within the German Bundeswehr Headquarters and as an Afghan Army and Police Engineer Advisor. For helping establish a trade school for Afghan police, I was awarded the Bronze Star Medal. I am currently a Civil Affairs Military Government Officer, focusing on cultural property protection; my initial Army Monuments Officer Training at the Smithsonian Institution was profiled by The New York Times and PBS Newshour.

My research centers on the building of a German occupation in Poland during the First World War amidst the disintegration of the German, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian Empires. It has been supported by a US Dept. of Education Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for Polish, two research fellowships by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and a doctoral fellowship by the German Historical Institute (Washington, DC). Among other awards, my dissertation was named winner of the Peter Lang 2020 Young Scholars Competition in the History category for German Studies in America. I will be publishing Broken Ground: Building Germany's Occupation of Poland in the First World War with Peter Lang (Oxford, UK) shortly.

Please contact me if you are interested in AU’s History or Global Studies programs, or studying abroad. If you're considering ROTC or military service after graduation, I'm happy to answer any questions based on my own experience.

Courses Taught

• GLBS 101: Intro to Global Studies
• HIST 107: The World in the 20th Century
• HIST 300: Putin's Russia
• HIST 300: Modern Warfare
• HIST 300: West Africa
• HIST 304: Historian's Craft: The Past
• HIST/POLS 321: The History of Fascism
• HIST 330: Southern Africa between Mandela and Mugabe
• HIST 340: Ukraine: Between Putin and the West
• HIST 358: Modern China
• HIST 388: Nation and Empire in Eastern Europe
• HIST/ARTH 391: Looting Europe: How Hitler Stole the Continent’s Art