Faculty

Adam Seipp

Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies

Adam Seipp

Specialty:

European War and Society, German history and Transnational history

Biography:

Dr. Adam R. Seipp’s research and teaching focus on war and social change in 20th century Europe. 

He is the author, most recently, of Strangers in the Wild Place: Refugees, Americans, and a German Town, 1945-1952, published in 2013 by Indiana University Press.   This book is an “international history of a very small place" - the rural Bavarian community of Wildflecken. In 1936, the Nazi state created a massive military training site near the town. During the Second World War, this base housed an industrial facility that drew forced laborers from all over conquered Europe. At war’s end, the base became Europe’s largest Displaced Persons camp, housing thousands of Polish refugees and German civilians fleeing Eastern Europe. As the Cold War intensified, the US Army occupied the base, removed the remaining refugees, and stayed until 1994. Strangers in the Wild Place tells the story of these tumultuous years through the eyes of these very different groups, who were forced to find ways to live together and form a functional society out of the ruins of Hitler’s Reich.

He is also the author of The Ordeal of Peace: Demobilization and the Urban Experience in Britain and Germany, 1917-21, along with articles and book chapters on the First World War, American basing policy in Europe, and re-armament debates in West Germany. He is interested in supervising undergraduate and graduate research in European and Military History, along with the history of sports.

Publications:

 

Strangers in the Wild Place: Refugees, Strangers in the Wild Place: Refugees, Americans, and a German Town, 1945-1952

The Ordeal of Peace: Demobilization and the Urban Experience in The Ordeal of Peace: Demobilization and the Urban Experience in Europe, 1917-21