Christopher Ewing
Assistant Professor
// History
Faculty
Assistant Professor
// Cornerstone
Faculty
Research focus:
Modern European History/LGBTQ History
Office and Contact
Room: BRNG 6163
Office hours:
- Wednesdays, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
- or By Appointment
Email: cbewing@purdue.edu
Phone: 46783
Christopher Ewing is an assistant professor in the Department of History whose work takes a transnational approach to histories of race, sexuality, and queerness in contemporary Germany. He received his Ph.D. in 2018 from the City University of New York, and prior to coming to Purdue, he was an assistant professor in history at Virginia Commonwealth University.
His first book, The Color of Desire: The Queer Politics of Race in the Federal Republic of Germany after 1970 (Cornell, 2023) shows how the politics of race were crucial to the formation of queer movements in the Federal Republic of Germany in the aftermath of gay liberation. Just as racism became entrenched in white, queer scenes across the political spectrum, so too did antiracism as queer activists of color contested overlapping forms of marginalization. This book traces the connections between activists and groups as they developed competing visions for queer, German politics.
His second book project, Hate: A Criminal History of Germany’s Violent ‘90s, examines how Germans made sense of right-wing violence after unification in 1990. By following transatlantic exchanges between activists, law enforcement, and politicians in the US and Germany, this project explains why “hate criminality” became such an important, international framework for understanding diverse forms of targeted violence at the end of the twentieth century.
His work has appeared in The Journal of the History of Sexuality, Sexualities, and Sexuality & Culture. He is currently co-editing an interdisciplinary volume titled Reading Queer Media in the German Speaking World: New Approaches to Print Sources, under contract with Palgrave Macmillan.
Read more about Christopher’s work below:
People | History | Virginia Commonwealth University (vcu.edu)
Christopher Ewing is currently accepting graduate students interested in studying the history of sexuality, modern German/European history, and transnational social history.