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. In January 2022, I’ll be co-leading a study abroad program to Germany, featuring the course HIST 300 Blood and Iron: Forging Modern Germany.

Travel and service inform my teaching and desire to help students think globally. I have been to 37 countries on five continents and lived abroad for more than three years nonconsecutively in Poland, Germany, and France. As a former Captain in the US 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. In part for establishing a trade school for Afghan police, I was awarded the Bronze Star Medal.

Later this year, I will accept a direct commission back into the US Army Reserve Civil Affairs branch as a Military Government Specialist, following the path of the WWII "Monuments Men." For a glimpse of what I’ll be doing, see this article in the New York Times.    

My own 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 with 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). 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 with Peter Lang (Oxford, UK) in 2021-2022.

Please contact me if you are interested in AU’s History or Global Studies programs. I’m happy to supervise an independent study or senior thesis project. Feel free to reach out.

Courses Taught

• HIST 107: The World in the 20th Century
• GLBS 101: Intro to Global Studies
• HIST 300: Ukraine: Between Putin and Trump
• HIST 300: Southern Africa between Mandela and Mugabe
• HIST 360: Historian's Craft (Team Taught)
• HIST 300: Empire: 1415-Present
• HIST 300: Putin's Russia
• HIST 300: Crisis Europe: Refugees, Neo-Nazis, and Political Disintegration
• HIST 321: The History of Fascism
• HIST 358: Modern China