Penn State Humanities Institute selects Altoona professor as resident scholar

John Eicher

John Eicher, associate professor of history at Penn State Altoona, has created a new YouTube lecture series focusing on the "ABCs" of modern Western history.

Credit: Penn State

ALTOONA, Pa. — John Eicher, associate professor of history at Penn State Altoona, was selected as a resident scholar at the Penn State Humanities Institute for the 2025 spring semester.

As a Humanities Fellow, Eicher will continue to research and write his current project, “The Sword Outside, the Plague Within: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in Europe," which he began in 2019. "The Sword Outside" focuses on socio-cultural interpretations of the 1918 influenza pandemic via a collection of nearly 1,000 personal memories of the event gathered from across ten European countries.