Matthew Kelley
Matthew Kelley
Teaching Assistant Professor
Matthew E. Kelley is a historian of Modern European History with a specialized focus on Central Europe and the First World War. His research interests include nationalism, internationalism, civil society, and political culture. His dissertation, “German Agitation in Swiss Civil Society during the Great War: Nationalism, Internationalism, and the Struggle for Neutrality,” examines how Germans used transnational social and cultural relationships between civic associations in Germany and Switzerland in order to achieve wartime goals and needs. These associations included Pan-German nationalist associations, international humanitarian organizations like the International Red Cross, the Swiss Alpine Club, and the international socialist youth movement. This project complicates the image of Swiss neutrality and Swiss national identity during the First World War by demonstrating how individuals mobilized in favor of the German war effort through shared identities and imagined communities. His current research projects include a further investigation into the history of Pan-German nationalism in Switzerland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and a study of the German-Swiss poet Hermann Hesse’s wartime propaganda activity.
Education
PhD, European History, University of Tennessee