Lora Wildenthal

Lora Wildenthal is an associate professor of History and chair of the History Department at Rice University in Houston, Texas.  Her areas of interest include modern Germany, European women, human rights and modern colonialism. Her current research examines what causes West Germans have considered to be “human rights” causes, and why West Germany had the kinds of human rights activists and experts that it did. Previously, she worked on how German women participated in Europe’s most intense period of imperial expansion, and how ideas of race in the colonial context implicated white German women. Wildenthal teaches courses on world history, modern Europe, the history of human rights, Nazi and post-1945 German history, nationalism, and the history of women, gender and feminism in Europe and around the world. She is currently completing a book to be entitled The Language of Human Rights in West Germany, which seeks to meet a need for studies of human rights activism that are closely contextualized in their domestic settings. Professor Wildenthal’s recent publications include “Human Rights Activism in Occupied and Early West Germany:  The Case of the German League for Human Rights” (Journal of Modern History, September 2008), and German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Duke University Press, 2001). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, and joined the faculty at Rice in 2003 after teaching at Pitzer College, M.I.T., and Texas A&M University.