Dr. Ritzheimer is a Modern European historian with a specialty in Modern German history. Her research interests include girlhood, gender, consumer culture, censorship, and national identity in Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi-era Germany. She teaches a variety of courses in the field of Modern European history, including survey courses and thematically and regionally focused classes.

Background

• Dr. Ritzheimer received her BA from Willamette University in 1997 and her PhD from Binghamton University in 2007. She received a dissertation fellowship from the Fulbright Foundation in support of her PhD research. She taught at Willamette University between 2003 and 2007 before joining the History Department at Oregon State University in 2007.  
   
• In 2016, she published ‘Trash,’ Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany with Cambridge University Press. The book uncovers the long cultural and political roots of Nazi-era censorship in pre-WWI social reform movements and the family politics of the Weimar Republic. She has also published articles on gender and film censorship in the Weimar Republic as well as censorship and youth policy in WWI Germany.
   
• Her current book project, Nazi Girl: Girls and Girlhood in Hitler’s Germany, is both a study of girlhood as a social, historical, and cultural construct and a reconsideration of major questions historians of the Nazi regime continue to grapple with. It is based on archival research completed in local, state, and federal archives, and uses a combination of Nazi administrative records, diaries and letters, criminal and Gestapo records, and propaganda material produced for girls, including movies, books, and magazines.
   
• Dr. Ritzheimer teaches Western Civilization: 1789 to the Present, 19th Century Europe, 20th Century Europe, Modern Germany, a History of Childhood, Hitler’s Europe, the Historian’s Craft, and the History of the Holocaust.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

“Trash,” Censorship, and National Identity in Early Twentieth Century Germany. Cambridge University Press, June 2016.
 
"Forging a Patriotic Youth: Penny Dreadfuls and Military Censorship in World War I Germany," in War and Childhood in the Era of the Two World Wars, editors Mischa Honeck and James Marten, Cambridge University Press, 2019.
 
"Protecting Gender Norms at the Local Movie Theater: The Heidelberg Committee for Monitoring Local Movie Theaters, 1919-1933,"  in Consuming Modernity: Gendered Behavior and Consumerism Before the Baby Boom, editors Cheryl Warsh and Dan Malleck, University of British Columbia Press, 2013.

She has also published numerous reviews in journals such as the German Studies Review, the Journal of Modern History, and Central European Historian.