Doctoral Candidate in History
About
B.A. in History, Williams College, 2018
Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Michigan
Sophie Wunderlich is a historian of the United States, Germany, and the far Right. Their dissertation, entitled, “American Fascism and its Afterlives: The American Far Right and Paramilitarism in a Global Perspective, 1930-1965,” follows the trajectory of U.S. interwar fascist movements to explore the genesis of the mid-century far Right from neo-Nazism to Christian Nationalism. A scholar of fascism, they are most interested in the Right's conceptions of race, gender, and religion.
Digital Humanities Projects:
- Co-Author, Project CAPTAIN (Combating Anti-LGBTQ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives) with the Southern Poverty Law Center, 2023.
- Report debunking the pseudoscience cited in recent anti-trans legislation and legal action, and exposing the networks organizing and funding the far Right’s ongoing anti-LGBTQ campaign. The project is the first large-scale, systematic analysis of this growing threat. Completed while working at the SPLC, sponsored by the Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellowship Program.
- Lead Editor and Co-creator, Research Database for The New Fascism Syllabus
- A searchable database of open access, digital collections on fascism, populism, and authoritarianism.
- Co-author, “American College Students and the Nazi Threat,” United States Holocaust Memorial Musem.
- A digital resource for undergraduate teaching with primary sources; responsible for research, curation, and writing for the digital collection and guides in a team of graduate students, professors, and museum professionals as a part of the HistoryLab partnership between the University of Michigan and the USHMM.
- Editorial Board of the Reverb Effect Podcast, 2022-2024.
Courses Taught:
- Religion in America
- American Radicalism
- Origins of Nazism
- The Holocaust
