Angela Zimmerman

Headshot of Angela Zimmerman

Angela Zimmerman

Professor of History and International Affairs

Full-time Faculty


Contact:

Office Phone: 202-994-0257
Fax: 202-994-6231

Angela Zimmerman studies revolutions, political thought, imperialism, and capitalism. Originally a historian of Germany and Europe, her geographical focus now also includes the United States and West Africa. Her teaching and research explore decolonizing approaches to history, including transnational archival research and the use of social and political theory.

Her recent research has focused on the global history of the U.S. Civil War, Reconstruction, and the New South. She is the author of Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton, 2010) and the editor of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (International Publishers, 2016). She is currently writing a history of the Civil War as an international working-class revolution with roots in Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean. It will be called “A Very Dangerous Element.” Her first book, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, 2001), studied imperialism, science, and popular culture. Her scholarship has been supported by organizations including the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Professor Zimmerman has many more publications available to read on her website.


  • Africa
  • Modern Europe
  • 19th-century United States
  • 20th-century United States
  • African American History
  • Imperialism and Colonialism
  • Ph.D., University of California, San Diego, 1998
  • HIST 1110: European Civilization in its World Context: 1715 to Present
  • HIST 1121: The War of Ideas in European and International History, 1750 to Present
  • HIST 2097: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century German History
  • HIST 3124: 19th-Century Europe
  • HIST 3160: History of Germany
  • HIST 6005: History and Historians
  • HIST 6006: Teaching History
  • HIST 6050: Modernization, Imperialism, Globalization (MIG)

“Guinea Sam Nightingale and Magic Marx in Civil War Missouri: Provincializing Global History and Decolonizing Theory.” History of the Present 8 (Fall 2018): 140-176.

Editor, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Civil War in the United States (International Publishers, 2016).

“From the Rhine to the Mississippi: Property, Democracy, and Socialism in the American Civil War.” Journal of the Civil War Era 5 (2015): 3-37.

“Cotton Booms, Cotton Busts, and the Civil War in West Africa,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 10 (2011): 454-463.

“Primitive Art, Primitive Accumulation, and the Origin of the Work of Art in German New Guinea,” History of the Present 1 (2011): 5-30.

“Three Logics of Race: Theory and Exception in the Transnational History of Empire,” New Global Studies 4 (2010), issue 1, article 6.

Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.

“‘What do you really want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?’ Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006): 419-461.

“Decolonizing Weber.” Postcolonial Studies 9 (2006): 53-79.

“A German Alabama in Africa: The Tuskegee Expedition to German Togo and the Transnational Origins of West African Cotton Growers.” American Historical Review 110 (2005): 1362-1398.

"Anti-Semitism as Skill: Rudolf Virchow’s Schulstatistik and the Racial Composition of Germany.” Central European History 32 (1999): 409-429.