Assistant Professor of History
College of Letters & Science | Department of History
Hometown: Sharon, MA
Brandon Bloch is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He researches and teaches on modern German and European history, with special interests in histories of religion, democracy, human rights, and social thought. His first book, “Reinventing Protestant Germany: Religious Nationalists and the Contest for Post-Nazi Democracy,” appeared with Harvard University Press in August 2025. He is currently conducting research on the expulsions of some twelve million ethnic Germans from East-Central Europe at the end of the Second World War.
Talks can also be given in German.
Talks:
Religion and Democracy in Post-Nazi Germany
In 1933, German Protestant pastors overwhelmingly backed the Nazi dictatorship; a generation later, Protestant churches stood at the forefront of advocacy for human rights, disarmament, and Cold War reconciliation in a post-Nazi democracy. My talk explores how this transformation came about, and why it matters in a period of resurgent religious nationalisms around the world.