Biography
John Eicher is an associate professor of modern European history. His research and teaching focus on the movements of people and diseases around the world.
In 2020, his prize-winning dissertation was published as a book titled Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age, with Cambridge University Press. This work was supported by the German Historical Institute-Washington DC, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Religious Research Association, the Mennonite Historical Society, and the University of Iowa. It received five book awards and was reviewed in eight publications.
His current project, “The Sword Outside, the Plague Within: A Cultural History of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Europe,” compares the cultural impact of the 1918 flu pandemic across ten European countries using 1,000 first-hand accounts of those who survived it. This work is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (Fellowship and Summer Stipend), Project House Europe at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Penn State Altoona.
Teaching
In Eicher's courses, students use historical research to develop their discussion, writing, and citizenship skills with the aim of understanding that historical scholarship is a dialogue between scholars, and between the academy and the public. In general, Eicher’s approach to teaching shows students how historians “do history,” even as it prepares them to be engaged scholars and citizens.
Introductory
- HIST 02: Western Civilization II, 1500-present
- HIST 120N: History of Modern Europe since 1789
- HIST 121: History of the Holocaust 1933-1945
- HIST 123: History of Science II
- HIST 124: History of Western Medicine
- HIST 139: The World at War: 1914-1918
- HIST 143N: History of Fascism and Nazism
Advanced
- HIST 420: Recent European History
- HIST 426: Holocaust
- HIST 429: Europe in the Age of Nationalism, 1789-1914
- HIST 435: Topics in European History:
- First World War: Art, Memory, and the (Re)Making of History
- Germans Beyond Germany, 1500-Present
- Migrants and Refugees in Modern Europe, 1917-Present
- Twentieth-century Europe: The Cold War and After
- HIST 455: The History of Epidemics
In the News
In brief: Did Europeans know the 1918 flu was a pandemic in 1918? (May 9, 2025)
Penn State Humanities Institute selects Altoona professor as resident scholar (May 23, 2024)
Penn State Altoona professor offers final lecture in history series (April 4, 2024)
Penn State Altoona history professor named 2023-24 Bechtel Lecturer (March 6, 2024)
Penn State Altoona history professor to offer lecture series (August 4, 2023)
Faculty member receives NEH Fellowship for research on 1918 Spanish flu (April 26, 2023)
Penn State Altoona history professor receives fellowship (January 17, 2023)
Book by Penn State Altoona history professor receives three awards (October 15, 2021)
Altoona professor to offer webinar on 1918 Spanish flu (January 21, 2021)
Letters from a Pandemic (December 18, 2020)
Altoona history professor awarded Project Development Grant (May 13, 2020)
Altoona history professor publishes book, wins fellowship (March 10, 2020)
John Eicher receives Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize (April 2, 2018)
Research Interests
Eicher’s book, Exiled Among Nations, compares two groups of German-speaking Mennonites from Russia. One group was composed of voluntary migrants and the other was composed of refugees. The voluntary migrants traveled from Imperial Russia to Canada in 1870, and from Canada to Paraguay in 1927. The refugees traveled from Soviet Russia to Germany in 1929, and from Germany to Paraguay in 1930. Settling next to each other in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco, the voluntary migrants established the Menno Colony and the refugees established the Fernheim Colony. Although the groups shared the same language, religion, and ancestry, they refused to associate with each other for nearly two decades. While the Menno Colony remained isolated from the modern world, the Fernheim Colony proselytized to their indigenous neighbors, aided the Paraguayan government during the Chaco War (1932-1935), received aid from North America and Germany, and endeared themselves to the Nazi Party in Germany. Exiled Among Nations contrasts these dramatic case studies to shed light on how migrants and refugees negotiate loyalties to domestic and foreign governments, aid organizations, co-religionists, and other mobile populations. More broadly, it shows how mobile populations use (and abandon) national, religious, and racial identifications to aid their movements.
Eicher’s current project, “The Sword Outside, the Plague Within” is the first cultural study of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Europe. It is also the first study to compare average Europeans’ understandings of healthcare during the pandemic, their notions of what caused the disease, their perceptions of the flu as a global event, and the experiences of both urban and rural survivors. Accompanied by common strains of bacterial pneumonia, the 1918 flu sickened over a billion people and killed upwards of 100 million individuals worldwide. Notably, the pandemic occurred amidst Europe’s increasingly urbanized and “rational” social landscape, and in the final months of a global war that had already taken the lives of twenty million people. The project draws on nearly 1,000 flu survivors’ testimonies, from across ten European countries, to understand Europeans’ impressions of healthcare and disease at the beginning of Western medicine’s “golden age” and amidst the aftermath of the First World War. Using quantitative analysis for qualitative interpretation, it describes the experiences of men and women, young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural, and across a range of professions, from nurses and professors to milkmaids and gravediggers.
Publications
Books
In Progress: “The Sword Outside, the Plague Within: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Europe.”
Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020 (hardcover, paperback, e-book).
- Bechtel Lecturer Award in Anabaptist-Mennonite Studies, Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo, 2023-24.
- Dale W. Brown Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, 2021.
- Fred Allen Womack and Frances Sue Zimmerman Womack Book Award, Pennsylvania State University-Altoona, 2021.
- German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Book Prize in German History/Social Sciences, DAAD & the German Studies Association, 2021. (Honorable Mention)
- Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize, University of Waterloo, 2021. (Shortlisted)
Chapters
“Diaspora Hermeneutics: Mennonite refugee narratives between the World Wars.” In New Perspectives in Diasporic Experience. Edited by Connie Rapoo, Maria Luisa Coelho, and Zahira Sarwar. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2014.
Articles
“A Provincial Pandemic: European Ignorance of the 1918 “Spanish” Influenza as a Shared Event,” Contemporary European History, May 6, 2025. (print edition forthcoming).
“MCC and Nazi Impressions of Paraguay’s Mennonite Colonies.” Intersections 9, no. 4 (2021): 27-32.
- Emma Lou and Gayle Thornbrough Award for Best Article in the Indiana Magazine of History, Indiana University and the Indiana Historical Society, 2011.
Education
- B.A. Goshen College, 2005
- M.A. University of Iowa, 2009
- Ph.D. University of Iowa, 2015
Performances and Exhibits
As a 2023-24 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Eicher created a ten-part public humanities lecture series titled "Western Civilization (1500-Present): From Dawn, to Decadence, to Disillusionment."
The series argues that the growth of bureaucracies in "the West" created a world in which abstractions eclipse reality. I explain and explore this argument through the development of what I call the "ABCs" of modern Western history: Abstraction, Bureaucracy, and Control.