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Headshot of Andie Speed.

Julia Andrea Speed PhD

Assistant Professor of History

Contact Information

970.943.7033 aspeed@western.edu
Kelley 227

Academic Divisions

Behavioral & Social Sciences Department

Functional Areas

History Degree History Secondary Education Applied Ethics

Education

PhD., Vanderbilt University, History, 2022
MA, New York University, History, 2016
BA, University of North Texas, History, 2008

Biography

I am a historian (Vanderbilt, 2022) of Europe in a global frame with special interests in gender/sexuality, international human rights, and migration. At Western, I teach courses on modern Europe (with a special focus on the German lands) and modern Southeast Asia (with a special focus on Thailand). Methodologically, my main toolsets draw on Gender/Sexuality, Migration, Public History, and Digital History. Broadly, this all means that I maintain deep interests in the imbrication of the local in the global and, relatedly, the way submerged and subaltern voices can complicate or undermine common narratives of the past. Students in my classes will also discover my interest in maps and, through programs like QGIS or ArcGIS, mapping. Prior to coming to Western, I taught at Vanderbilt University during my PhD and spent several years on research fellowships in Germany.

Courses Taught

    • Hist 100: Topics in World, Migration and Mobility
    • Hist 200: Historical Methods
    • Hist 302: Topics in World, Nations and Nationalism
    • Hist 302: Topics in World, Mountains and Mountaineering
    • Hist 313: Topics in Early Modern Europe, Empires
    • Hist 317: Topics in Modern Europe, Gender and Sexuality
    • Hist 372: Monuments and Museums
    • Hist 520: Cartography and Power (Summer Teacher Institute)
    • Phil 355: Philosophy of Science and Epistemology

Publications:

  • “On Sunlit Fields: the Swabian Children, Legal Personhood, and the Tyrolean Statthalterei’s Edict of 1867,” German Studies Review. Special Section, “Rural Kinetics: Migrations, Marginality, and Material Flows in Germanophone Europe, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” ed. Patrick Anthony. (Feb 2024), 125 – 143.
  • “Pious Guardians: the ‘Swabian Children Association’ and Child-Welfare in Tyrol, 1891 – 1915,” Citizenship, Migration and Social Rights: Historical Experiences from the 1870s to the 1970s, ed. Beate Althammer ( Routledge, 2023), 99 – 118.
  • “A ‘Child Export’: the Swabian Children at the Austro-German Border, 1908 – 1914,” Österreich-Studien im 21. Jahrhundert: Sozial und Geschichtswissenschaftliche Perspektiven. Band 2. Ed. Michael Burri, Christian Karner, Sawomir Piontek (University of Vienna Press, 2025).