Alison Frank Johnson

Alison Frank Johnson received degrees in German and Russian at Williams College (B.A.) and in History at Harvard University (A.M. and Ph.D.). She also has studied at the Karl Franzens Universität Graz (Austria) and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland). She was assistant professor of History (German-speaking Europe and the Habsburg Empire) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before joining the History Department at Harvard University in 2005. She became a member of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in 2017. She has been a visiting fellow at the Institut für Bayerische Geschichte at the LMU Munich, the Institute for Global History at the FU Berlin, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Vienna) and the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna). Her work has also been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Fulbright Commission.

Alison Frank Johnson regularly teaches courses on the history of German-speaking Europe from the 1740s to the present, religion and popular culture, and Austrian history and literature. She has published articles on capital punishment; dueling; the Mediterranean slave trade; the role of multinational corporations in international diplomacy; Alpine spa towns; pilgrimage; and Austria-Hungary’s role as a maritime power, among other topics. She is currently working on a project about the removal of relics associated with blood libel from churches in Germany, Austria, and Italy in the postwar period. Her first book, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (2005), was awarded the Barbara Jelavich 2006 book prize, the Austrian Cultural Forum 2006 Book Prize, and the Polish Studies Association 2006 Orbis Book Prize.

Alison Frank Johnson’s proudest professional accomplishments are her three teaching prizes: the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award (2019), the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize (2017), and the Roslyn Abramson Award (2007).