In her role as Special Advisor to the Provost on Humanics, Uta G. Poiger is working with colleagues, students and partners across Northeastern’s global campus system to foster signature educational initiatives in the context of Northeastern’s experiential learning model and the university’s New Academic Plan, Experience Unleashed.
From November 2012 to June 2023, Poiger served as Dean of the College of Social Science and Humanities at Northeastern University. With the college’s faculty, staff and students, she worked to enhance the college’s and the university’s leadership in the Experiential Liberal Arts. As the organizational philosophy and integrative educational model of the college, the Experiential Liberal Arts is intertwined with Northeastern’s mission in Humanics. Under her leadership, the college developed three areas of strategic focus: the intersections of resilience and sustainability; cultural transformations, governance and globalization; and network science, digital humanities and information ethics. Together with Richard Daynard, she led the committee that formulated Northeastern’s new general education curriculum NUpath, implemented in 2016.
Together with Angel Nieves, Kabria Baumgartner and Dan Cohen, Poiger leads the Mellon-funded initiative Reckonings: A Local History Platform for the Community Archivist.
In her research, Poiger examines 20th-century German culture and society from a transnational perspective, and makes the study of race and gender central to these explorations. In individually authored as well as collaborative books and articles, she has addressed questions of Americanization, globalization, imperialism, and the promises and challenges of comparative history. Her graduate and undergraduate teaching has included courses on modern European and German history, the Holocaust and comparative genocide, gender and sexuality, and historiography.
Poiger holds a PhD in History from Brown University and an MA in History from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She began her studies at Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg, Germany. Before coming to Northeastern as chair of the History Department in 2011, Poiger taught for sixteen years at the University of Washington, Seattle, where she was the Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History and Adjunct Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.