Christian Bailey

Christian Bailey is associate professor of history and a contributing member of the gender studies faculty. Most of his courses explore modern European history, typically from a global perspective. 

Bailey is currently writing a comparative history of environmentalism in Germany and the United States. While environmentalists in both nations may share many similarities, the outcomes of their activism have been starkly different. Bailey suggests that environmentalists’ antiwar records explain both their success in Germany and their relative marginality in the United States. With the end of the Cold War, Germany’s leaders sought to strengthen their reunified nation’s green credentials and thereby amplify its soft power in what they hoped was a post-conflict global order. By contrast, American planners regarded fossil fuels not only as an ongoing stimulus to American prosperity but as global commodities whose flow the US military must help to steer and ensure in order to preserve a stable world system. Fossil fuels and green alternatives have therefore played very different roles in the energy futures envisaged by the political classes in these two countries.

Bailey’s previous book focused on love within German Jewish communities (German Jews in Love: A History, Stanford University Press, 2022). The book starts in the 1870s, when marriages between Jews and Christians were first permitted, and ends a century later, in the aftermath of the sexual revolution. He argues that by studying sources such as diaries, love letters, and court reports, we can understand how individuals unwittingly provoked cultural, social, and ultimately political change by such simple acts as falling in love. 

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow: German Visions of Europe, 1926–1950 (2013, paperback 2016) was Bailey’s first book. It spotlighted German ideas for integrating Europe in the mid-20th century.