Postdoctoral Researcher at the Rank of Instructor 2022-23
Benjamin W. Goossen is a historian of modern Europe and the world. His research and teaching interests concern the intersections of environmental history, global and international history, and science and technology studies. Goossen’s current book project, The Year of the Earth: A Planetary History, examines the global expansion and contested nature of earth science during the Cold War and collapse of European empires. It offers a deep dive into the International Geophysical Year of 1957-1958, an ambitious program to understand our planet as a unified environment through collaboration between tens of thousands of scientists and citizen volunteers from most countries. This project asks how Cold War rivalries and processes of decolonization shaped and were, in turn, informed by transnational efforts to acquire comprehensive environmental data—including data related to “extreme” regions like the upper atmosphere, the deep ocean, the poles, and outer space.
His first book, Chosen Nation: Mennonites and Germany in a Global Era (Princeton University Press, 2017), tells the story of a predominantly rural and historically pacifist religious community that developed complex relationships with German nationalism across three continents in concert with rising transnational sensibilities. Chosen Nation contributes to scholarship that emphasizes the malleability, historical contingency, and socially situated nature of nationalist practices and ways of thinking about national belonging. By adopting global and transnational perspectives, this book examines how insights developed by historians of nationalism travel and refract when viewed through the actions and experiences of one small, densely networked religious group whose members lived and moved across Europe and the world.
Goossen’s scholarship has appeared in Antisemitism Studies, Contemporary European History, German Studies Review, the Journal of Global History, and elsewhere. Support for his research has come from institutions including the American Historical Association, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM), the Fulbright Commission, the German Academic Exchange Service, NASA, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He holds a BA from Swarthmore College and a PhD from Harvard University.
