Derek Hastings
Title: Professor
Office: 410D Varner Hall
Phone: (248) 370-3535
Fax: (248) 370-3528
Email: [email protected]
Education:
Ph.D., University of Chicago
Major Fields:
Modern Europe, German History, Nationalism, Religion and Society
Biography:
Derek Hastings is a historian of modern Europe, with a particular emphasis on the social and cultural history of Germany in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His first book, Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism (Oxford, 2010), explored the changing religious identity of the early Nazi movement between its founding in 1919 and the mid-1920s. His second book, Nationalism in Modern Europe (Bloomsbury, 2018; revised and expanded second edition, 2023), focuses on the interplay between nationalism and other markers of identity and belonging in modern Europe. His current book project examines the life and career of Ernst Röhm, the head of the Nazi paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA).
Professor Hastings enjoys teaching the introductory European history survey, in addition to advanced undergraduate and graduate courses on modern Germany, European nationalism, and the Nazi regime.
Publications:
Books
Nationalism in Modern Europe: Politics, Identity, and Belonging since the French Revolution, revised and expanded second edition (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). First edition published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018.
Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010; paperback 2011).
Articles and Chapters
"Reconstructing Röhm: Addressing the Destruction of Source Material in Writing the Life of the Nazi SA Leader," German History 43 (2025), in press.
"Competing Visions of Anti-Communism in Interwar Germany: Catholic and Nazi Portrayals of the 'Judeo-Bolshevik' Threat," Twentieth-Century Communism: A Journal of International History 19 (Fall 2020): 6-25.
"Nation, Race, and Religious Identity in the Early Nazi Movement," Religions 9:10 (October 2018): 1-14. Special issue on "Nationalism and Religion," edited by Liah Greenfeld.
"Fears of a Feminized Church: Catholicism, Clerical Celibacy, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Wilhelmine Germany," European History Quarterly 38:1 (January 2008): 34-65.
"How 'Catholic' Was the Early Nazi Movement? Religion, Race, and Culture in Munich, 1919-1924," Central European History 36:3 (Fall 2003): 383-433.
Work in Progress
Röhm: The Rise and Fall of a Nazi Icon (book manuscript, in progress).
External Links
Department of History
371 Varner Dr.
Rochester, MI 48309-4482
(location map)
(248) 370-3510
fax: (248) 370-3528