Biography
John Eicher is an associate professor of history at Penn State Altoona, where he teaches the history of modern Europe, medicine, and migration. His work focuses on how ordinary people interpret and remember catastrophes such as epidemics, war, and displacement.
He is the author of Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age (Cambridge University Press, 2020), which received the Dale W. Brown Book Award and the Womack Book Award, an honorable mention for the DAAD Book Prize, and was shortlisted for the Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize. It was reviewed in nine publications, including the American Historical Review and the Journal of Modern History. This project was supported by the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Mennonite Historical Society, and the Religious Research Association.
His second book project, The Sword Outside, the Plague Within: How a Disillusioned Europe Survived the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, is in progress. Research for this book has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, Project House Europe at LMU-Munich, and the Penn State Humanities Institute. His article "A Provincial Pandemic" received the 2026 Charles R. Bailey Memorial Prize from the New York State Association of European Historians.
The project is based on a digital archive of 1918 influenza testimonies and an interactive map built with undergraduate research assistants at Penn State Altoona and the University of Freiburg. He also serves on the editorial committee of Penn State University Press and is the founder and director of Metabytes, an AI and humanities lab at Penn State Altoona.
Teaching
Eicher teaches history from a transnational perspective, following people, pathogens, and ideas across borders. His courses treat the past as both a lens and a laboratory—a way of seeing the world and a space for experimenting with ideas—where students inhabit historical roles, work with archives, and carry coursework beyond the classroom into public projects. The aim is less to supply answers than to cultivate discernment: weighing evidence, navigating ambiguity, and synthesizing across sources.
Introductory
- HIST 02: Western Civilization II, 1500-present
- HIST 120N: History of Modern Europe since 1789
- HIST 121: History of the Holocaust 1933-1945
- HIST 123: History of Science II
- HIST 124: History of Western Medicine
- HIST 139: The World at War: 1914-1918
- HIST 143N: History of Fascism and Nazism
Advanced
- HIST 420: Recent European History
- HIST 426: Holocaust
- HIST 429: Europe in the Age of Nationalism, 1789-1914
- HIST 435: Topics in European History:
- First World War: Art, Memory, and the (Re)Making of History
- Germans Beyond Germany, 1500-Present
- Migrants and Refugees in Modern Europe, 1917-Present
- Twentieth-century Europe: The Cold War and After
- HIST 455: The History of Epidemics
In the News
Penn State Altoona professor wins prize for Spanish flu article (August 18, 2026)
Penn State Altoona professor speaks at Holocaust art exhibition (May 20, 2026)
In brief: Did Europeans know the 1918 flu was a pandemic in 1918? (May 9, 2025)
Penn State Humanities Institute selects Altoona professor as resident scholar (May 23, 2024)
Penn State Altoona professor offers final lecture in history series (April 4, 2024)
Penn State Altoona history professor named 2023-24 Bechtel Lecturer (March 6, 2024)
Penn State Altoona history professor to offer lecture series (August 4, 2023)
Faculty member receives NEH Fellowship for research on 1918 Spanish flu (April 26, 2023)
Penn State Altoona history professor receives fellowship (January 17, 2023)
Book by Penn State Altoona history professor receives three awards (October 15, 2021)
Altoona professor to offer webinar on 1918 Spanish flu (January 21, 2021)
Letters from a Pandemic (December 18, 2020)
Altoona history professor awarded Project Development Grant (May 13, 2020)
Altoona history professor publishes book, wins fellowship (March 10, 2020)
John Eicher receives Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize (April 2, 2018)
Research Interests
Eicher works from first-person testimonies—diaries, letters, and oral histories—to study the stories communities tell when catastrophe overturns the world they know, and why some of those stories settle into collective memories while others do not.
His current book project, The Sword Outside, the Plague Within, is the first transnational cultural history of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Europe. Drawing on nearly 1,000 survivor testimonies from ten countries, it argues that many Europeans did not believe they were living through influenza at all. Some suspected the disease was pneumonic plague—the Black Death in its deadliest form. Others believed the disease was carried on the wind from the countless unburied dead on the war front. Yet survivors also described the catastrophe in strictly local terms—their village, their family, their own collapse into triage—and never assembled those accounts into a shared event.
Eicher argues the 1918 flu cannot be understood apart from the war that broke Europeans’ faith in their societies—and helps us understand our own. Europeans anticipated a great war for decades before 1914, just as the world anticipated a global pandemic before 2020. Anticipated catastrophes become referendums on a civilization's promises about itself—its solidarity, its resilience, its capacity to endure a crisis without abandoning its way of life.
The war broke those promises, and COVID-19 broke them again. The flu broke nothing, because Europeans did not expect it and did not anticipate their governments would resolve it. It put neither the nation-state nor the idea of Progress on trial, and Europeans did not see their collective hopes or failures mirrored in it. They did not remember it as a shared event, despite its enormous private toll. That asymmetry is why the flu still matters. In both pandemics, official narratives diverged from lived experience and people made their own sense of the crisis. In 1918, that produced local coherence. In 2020, it produced fragmentation. The information environment changed, the epistemological problem did not.
Exiled Among Nations followed similar problems of interpretation into religious life. Two groups of German-speaking Mennonites—one of voluntary migrants, one of refugees—settled beside each other in Paraguay's Gran Chaco in the late 1920s and then refused to associate for nearly two decades. They shared a language, an ancestry, and a faith, but had arrived by different roads and drew opposite lessons from them. The book shows how mobile populations take up and discard national, racial, and religious identifications to move to new lands and survive in a world of growing nationalism and hardening borders.
Publications
Books
In progress. “The Sword Outside, the Plague Within: How a Disillusioned Europe Survived the 1918 Influenza Pandemic.”
Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020 (hardcover, paperback, e-book).
- Winner, Bechtel Lecturer Award in Anabaptist-Mennonite Studies, Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo, 2023-24.
- Winner, Dale W. Brown Book Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College, 2021.
- Winner, Fred Allen Womack and Frances Sue Zimmerman Womack Book Award, Pennsylvania State University-Altoona, 2021.
- Honorable Mention, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Book Prize in German History/Social Sciences, DAAD & the German Studies Association, 2021.
- Shortlisted, Waterloo Centre for German Studies Book Prize, University of Waterloo, 2021.
Chapters
“Comparative Narratives: Russlanddeutsch Migration Stories.” In Jenseits der “Volksgruppe”: Neue Perspektiven auf die Russlanddeutschen zwischen Russland, Deutschland und Amerika [Beyond the “Volksgruppe”: New Perspectives on Russian Germans between Russia, Germany, and America]. Edited by Victor Dönninghaus, Jannis Panagiotidis, and Hans-Christian Petersen, 73–86. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017.
“Diaspora Hermeneutics: Mennonite refugee narratives between the World Wars.” In New Perspectives in Diasporic Experience. Edited by Connie Rapoo, Maria Luisa Coelho, and Zahira Sarwar, 35–50. Oxford: Interdisciplinary Press, 2014.
Articles
- Winner, Charles R. Bailey Memorial Prize (2026), awarded every three years by the New York State Association of European Historians for the best article in European history.
“MCC and Nazi Impressions of Paraguay’s Mennonite Colonies.” Intersections 9, no. 4 (2021): 27–32.
- Winner, Emma Lou and Gayle Thornbrough Award for Best Article in the Indiana Magazine of History, Indiana University and the Indiana Historical Society, 2011.
Book Reviews
Education
- B.A. Goshen College, 2005
- M.A. University of Iowa, 2009
- Ph.D. University of Iowa, 2015
Performances and Exhibits
In 2023-24, Eicher created a ten-part YouTube public humanities lecture series titled "Western Civilization (1500-Present): From Dawn, to Decadence, to Disillusionment."
The series argues that the growth of bureaucracies in "the West" created a world in which abstractions eclipse reality. He explains and explores this argument through the development of what he calls the "ABCs" of modern Western history: Abstraction, Bureaucracy, and Control.