Class News

Erik Midelfort '64 participating in Yale Educational Travel trip

May 29, 2017

Erik Midelfort '64 ('70 Yale PhD) will be the faculty member on the upcoming Yale Educational Travel trip to Germany, titled "From Luther to the Berlin Wall: 500 Years of World History." Details of the trip, from November 2-11, 2017, are available on the Yale Educational Travel site.

Erik is an historian of early modern Europe who has specialized in German history from about 1500 AD to 1800 AD. He has published widely on Luther, the Peasants' War, and the German Reformation. Another scholarly interest of his has been the translation of German historical studies into English, most recently a study of the "Enlightenment Underground" by the German scholar Martin Mulsow (2015). He has also worked on such topics as witch hunting, the history of demonic possession, and the history of psychiatry, madness, and conceptions of folly and insanity.

He taught history at Stanford, Harvard, Stuttgart, and Bern, but the bulk of his career was spent at the University of Virginia. In 2003 he delivered the Terry Lectures at Yale, published in 2005 as Exorcism and Enlightenment. Because of his lifelong passion for German history, he and his wife, Anne McKeithen, have lived for extended periods of time in Germany, including in Tübingen, Augsburg, Munich, Marburg, and Berlin. Most recently he and his wife spent a semester at the American Academy in Berlin in 2011.