Dr. Drew Flanagan
Degrees and Credentials
Ph.D. European History, Brandeis University 2018
M.A. European History, Brandeis University 2011
B.A. European History, Wesleyan University 2010
Short Bio
Dr. Flanagan has previously taught at Brandeis University and in the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po) Europe-Asia program in Le Havre, France. He has conducted archival research in France and Germany. He speaks French and reads German. He sings and plays guitar in the faculty-staff rock band and also plays the violin.
Academic Focus
Dr. Flanagan is a specialist in 20th-century French and German history, with a focus on the Second World War and the early postwar period, transnational and borderlands history, war and society studies, political anthropology, and the history of memory. He teaches broadly in the areas of European and world history, including survey, intermediate and upper-division courses such as “Renaissance and Reformation in Europe,” “Global History,” “World War II,” “Colonial Empires in the Modern World,” “East Asia: China, Korea, Japan” and “Fascism and Neo-Fascism.”
Research, Accomplishments, and Publications
Dr. Flanagan has received a number of prestigious grants and fellowships, including a Chateaubriand Humanities and Social Sciences Fellowship from the Embassy of France in the United States and a National Endowment for the Humanities summer scholarship. Most recently, in May 2025, he participated in a Fulbright-Hays funded group project in the West African countries of Senegal and the Gambia.
Dr. Flanagan’s book Radiance on the Rhine is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in spring 2026. Here is the official synopsis from LSU Press:
After the collapse of the National Socialist regime in May 1945, France became one of four principal occupying powers in a defeated Germany. Within their Zone of Occupation, along the Upper and Middle Rhine, French occupiers participated in the Allied project to remake German society. In the process, they confronted the long history of Franco-German rivalry in the region as well as their country’s diminished power in the wake of World War II.
Radiance on the Rhine explores how French ideas about civilization and the civilizing process shaped the practice of occupation in the French Zone and the early stages of European integration. The French Zone was set apart from the other Allied zones by the occupiers’ belief that Nazi “barbarism” was deeply rooted in German culture and history. In seeking to transform the Germans along their border into acceptable partners for France within a united western Europe, the French occupiers applied their notion of France’s universal civilizing mission, adapting “civilizing” strategies and practices developed in France’s overseas colonies to a European population. In the process, they confronted Germans’ own ideas about their country’s historical relationship with French and western civilization.
Through six thematic chapters, Radiance on the Rhine explores the impact of civilizational thinking on the French occupation and its outcome. Whether applying counterinsurgency methods developed in French North Africa to the pacification and control of their zone or attempting to address what they perceived as the deep-rooted flaws of German culture through reeducation and propaganda, the French sought to impose their civilizational vision. At the same time, they used that vision to justify and guide the first postwar attempts at cross-border economic integration. Through both conflicts and cooperation with the German population, including German “Francophile” elites and intermediaries, the French in occupied Germany participated in negotiating a shared vision of western European civilization that they hoped would ensure French leadership in Europe. Drew Flanagan deftly details and analyzes the entanglement between the Europeanization of the French Zone and decolonization in France’s empire, prompting us to consider the continued impact of colonial and imperial ideas and practices on contemporary Europe and the European Union.
Dr. Flanagan has previously published three chapters in edited volumes:
“A Universal Mission: The Propaganda and Folklore of Robert Boutet Between Morocco and Occupied Germany, 1931-49” in Sylvia Dümmer Scheel, Charlotte Faucher and Camila Gatica Mizala eds., Soft Power Beyond the Nation. Georgetown University Press, 2024.: 109-126.
“Tu Viens en Allemagne!: Französische Reiseliteratur und die Geschichte des Rheins, 1945-55” in Angela Schwarz and Daniela Fleiß, eds., Reisen in die Vergangenheit: Geschichtstourismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Böhlau Verlag, 2019.: 317-339.
“La Juste sévérité: Pacifier la zone française d'occupation en Allemagne occupée, 1945-49” in Emmanuel Debruyne, Élise Julien, Matthias Meirlaen and James Connolly eds. En territoire ennemi: Les occupations de la Grande Guerre et leurs héritières, 1914-1954. Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2018.: 203-214.