ALTOONA, Pa. — John Eicher, assistant professor of history, has published the book “Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age.” The book discusses how groups of people fashion shared identities in the modern world. It follows two communities of German-speaking Mennonites -- one composed of voluntary migrants and the other of refugees -- across four continents between 1870 and 1945 and explores how religious migrants engaged with the phenomenon of nationalism.
Eicher was also recently awarded a Marie S. Curie Junior Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) at the University of Freiburg. He will spend his fellowship researching and writing the new manuscript “The Sword Outside, the Plague Within: Influenza, War, and Religion, 1918-1920,” which compares rural and religious interpretations of the “Spanish flu” pandemic in Central Europe and the British Isles.