PhD in History (2025)
About
B.A. in History, Williams College, 2018
Ph.D. Candidate in History, University of Michigan
Sophie Wunderlich is a historian of the United States, Germany, and the far Right. A scholar of fascism, Sophie is most interested in the Right's conceptions of race, gender, and religion. The dissertation, entitled, “American Fascism and its Afterlives: The American Far Right and Paramilitarism in a Global Perspective, 1930-1965,” follows the trajectory of U.S. interwar fascist movements to explore the genesis of the mid-century far Right from neo-Nazism to Christian Nationalism. The project has been generously supported by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Michigan State University Libraries, and Rackham Graduate School. Sophie is currently funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, after being awarded an Emerging Scholars Award in 2024, which supports projects addressing historical and contemporary issues of violence.
Digital Humanities Projects:
- Co-Author, Project CAPTAIN (Combating Anti-LGBTQ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives) with the Southern Poverty Law Center, 2023.
- Report debunking the pseudoscience cited in recent anti-trans legislation and legal action, and exposing the networks organizing and funding the far Right’s ongoing anti-LGBTQ campaign. The project was the first large-scale, systematic analysis of this growing threat. Completed while working at the SPLC, sponsored by the Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellowship Program.
- Lead Editor and Co-creator, Research Database for The New Fascism Syllabus
- A searchable database of open access, digital collections on fascism, populism, and authoritarianism.
- Co-author, “American College Students and the Nazi Threat,” United States Holocaust Memorial Musem.
- A digital resource for undergraduate teaching with primary sources; responsible for research, curation, and writing for the digital collection and guides in a team of graduate students, professors, and museum professionals as a part of the HistoryLab partnership between the University of Michigan and the USHMM.
- Editorial Board of the Reverb Effect Podcast, 2022-2024.
Courses Taught:
- Religion in America
- American Radicalism
- Origins of Nazism
- The Holocaust
