faculty

Richard Wetzell

Adjunct Associate Professor in the BMW Center for German and European Studies
Ph.D. Stanford University, 1991

Richard Wetzell is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC. His research is situated at the intersection of legal history, political history, and the history of science, and has focused on the history of criminal justice and criminology in modern Germany. He is the author of Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880-1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and co editor of Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective Cambridge University Press, 2004). He is currently completing a legal and political history of penal reform in Germany from 1870 to 1945. He is also the editor of the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute. His next research project concerns the history of sexuality in modern Germany.

Dr. Wetzell was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and taught at Stanford University and the University of Maryland, College Park. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund, and the Stanford Humanities Center. Together with Roger Chickering, he coordinates the annual Transatlantic Doctoral Seminar in Germany History, sponsored by the German Historical Institute and the BMW Center for German & European Studies.