Rate My Professor Monica Black

Monica Black is Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she joined the faculty in 2010 and was promoted to full professor in 2021. She also holds the title of Distinguished Professor in the Humanities from 2022 to 2027. Prior to her position at UTK, Black served as Assistant Professor of History at Furman University. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia in 2006, an M.A. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2002, and a B.A. from the University of North Carolina.

Black specializes in the cultural and social history of modern Germany, with a focus on the era of the World Wars and the postwar decades. Her research examines how ordinary Germans confronted existential crises, including death, moral disorder, and supernatural phenomena amid profound historical ruptures. Her first book, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge University Press, 2010), traces the evolving cultural practices surrounding death across Berlin's twentieth-century upheavals, from the Third Reich through division. The work received the 2010 Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History. Her second monograph, A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), explores the widespread resurgence of occult beliefs and miracle healings in 1950s West Germany during the Wirtschaftswunder. Black has co-edited Revisiting the 'Nazi Occult': Histories, Realities, Legacies (Camden House, 2015) with Eric Kurlander. Among her honors are Chancellor's Awards at UTK and convocation recognitions for early career excellence. She has served as Associate Director of the UTK Humanities Center, contributed to public lectures and podcasts on German history, and teaches courses such as History of Medicine in the Third Reich and German Culture from the Brothers Grimm to Krautrock.