Robert Terrell

• 2025 Spring
  • HST 363 Germany Since 1945
  • HST 803 Theories and Philosophies of History
• 2024 Fall
  • HST 495 Distinction Thesis in History
  • HST 314 Europe from Bismarck to the First World War
  • HST/JSP 362 Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
• 2024 Spring
  • HST 495/496 Distinction Thesis in History
  • HST 363 Germany Since 1945
  • HST 401 Senior Seminar - Food and Foodways
• 2023 Fall
  • HST 495 Distinction Thesis in History
  • HST/JSP 362 Nazi Germany and the Holocaust
  • HST 300 Selected Topics - Food in Modern Europe
• 2023 Spring
  • HST 316 Europe Since 1945
  • HST 803 Theories and Philosophies of History

Robert Terrell is a historian of modern Germany and Europe. His research focuses on questions of scale in German history, which he accesses through the movement of food, commodities, capital and people. His first book, A Nation Fermented: Beer, Bavaria, and the Making of Modern Germany (Oxford University Press, 2024), reveals how brewers, regulators and cultural intermediaries in Bavaria shaped both the structures and discourses of the German nation in the twentieth century.

His current research moves in two directions. The first centers on a book tentatively titled Modernity’s Underbelly: Restaurants, Food, and Service Labor in Munich that uses restaurants to index social changes and challenges ranging from shifting food chains and mass feeding in the course of urbanization to consumer culture and labor exploitation in the service sector. The first published work in this vein will include a co-authored article on the militarization of beer halls in early 1920s Munich, and a solo-authored article on the methodical problems of historicizing waitresses.

He is also pursuing research on the connections between the Weimar Republic and the post-Ottoman Middle East which has thus far taken the form of an article about the global entanglements that informed the construction of the Berlin Mosque in the 1920s. 

He is co-organizer of the Central New York Humanities Corridor working group Research and Narrative in Modern European History. 

• Book
  • Terrell, R. S., A Nation Fermented: Beer, Bavaria, and the Making of Modern Germany. Oxford University Press, 2024.
• Journal Articles
  • Terrell, R. S., "Entanglements of Scale: The Beer Purity Law from Bavarian Oddity to German Icon, 1906-1975." Contemporary European History, 2023.
  • Terrell, R. S., "Building the Berlin Mosque: An Episode in Weltpolitik." In Contemporary European History. , 2021.
• Book Chapter
  • Terrell, R. S., "‘Lurvenbrow’: Bavarian Beer Culture and Barstool Diplomacy in the Global Market, 1945-1964." In Alcohol Flows Across Cultures: Drinking Cultures in Comparative and Transnational Perspective. Routledge, 2020.
• Book Reviews
  • Terrell, R. S., "Malcolm F. Purinton, Globalization in a Glass: The Rise of Pilsner Beer through Technology, Taste and Empire." H-Sci-Med-Tech, 2024.
  • Terrell, R. S., "Adam T. Rosenbaum. Bavarian Tourism and the Modern World, 1800–1950.." H-TGS, 2023.
  • Terrell, R. S., Westermann, E. B., "Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany." In Central European History. , 2022.
  • Terrell, R. S., Foda, O. D., "Egpyt’s Beer: Stella, Identity, and the Modern State." In Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. , 2020.
  • Terrell, R. S., Weinreb, A., "Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth Century." In Global Food History. , 2018.
  • Terrell, R. S., Gesellschaft in der Europäischen Integration seit den 1950er Jahren: Migration – Konsum – Sozialpolitik – Repräsentationen. Bauerkämper , A., Kaelble, H. (eds.) Franz Steiner Verlag, 2015.