Stephen Gross

University of California, Berkeley, PhD 2010; University of California, Berkeley MA 2006; University of Virginia BA in History and Economics 2002 (with distinction).

Modern Germany; European Unification; Economic History and Political Economy; International Relations; Energy Policy; World War I and II;

Stephen G. Gross is jointly appointed in the Department of History and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU. After working for several years as an economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis in Washington DC, he completed his PhD at UC Berkeley where he subsequently lectured with the International and Area Studies Program. In his research and teaching Dr. Gross is interested in 20th century Germany, European unification, European and international political economy, energy policy, and international relations. His first book, Export Empire, was published by Cambridge University Press in December 2015. He has also published on a variety of economic themes in German and European history in Central European History, Contemporary European History, German Politics and Society, and Eastern European Politics and Society, as well as in various book chapters.

Dr. Gross' first book project—Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945—explores the relationship between imperialism, economic development, and cultural exchange from the perspective of non-state actors such as trade fairs, research institutes, and professional exchange programs. It traces how German business leaders and academics established commercial hegemony in Southeastern Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. Where scholars have used the concept of soft power to describe the foreign policy of liberal states, he concludes that authoritarian Nazi Germany was also able to exercise its own type of soft power, so long as its private institutions retained the space to operate in the interstices of state power.

Where his first monograph explores the commercial power that supported Hitler’s racist imperial ambitions, his second book project will trace how, after 1945, Germany crafted an energy policy that suited a nation heavily dependent on foreign oil and foreign multi-national corporations, and that ultimately enabled Germany to become a leader in renewable energies and energy savings technologies. German Energy Policy in the Age of Oil and Atoms, 1945–2010, as the book is tentatively titled, will explore the political economy of energy crises and transition, tracing how this oil-poor yet highly industrial state managed the transition from coal, to oil, to more renewable fuels, how it negotiated the many intense political and social tensions that came with this transition, and how it inaugurated what is now called the German Energiewende, or revolution to Green energy. By combining an exploration of the material interests involved in the energy sector with newly emerging ideas and scientific paradigms that justified renewable energies, the project aims to provide a more complete understanding of current energy policies in Germany and Europe.

Andrew Carnegie Fellow 2017-2019; Andrew Mellon New Directions Fellowship, 2018-2020; Institute for New Economic Thinking Research Fellowship 2015–2016; NYU Humanities Initiative Team Teaching Fellowship 2015-2016; DAAD postdoctoral research fellowship 2012; Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies 2009; Fellow - Northwestern Univ. Summer Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization—2009; Fulbright Research Fellowship 2008

Stephen G. Gross, “Reimagining Energy and Growth: Decoupling and the Rise of a New Energy Paradigm in West Germany, 1973–1986,” forthcoming in Central European History 50/3 (December 2017).

Stephen G. Gross, “The Nazi Economy,” in Shelley Baranowski, Armin Nolzen and Claus-Christian Szejnmann (eds.), A Companion to Nazi Germany (Oxford: Wilely-Blackwell, forthcoming in 2018).

Stephen G. Gross, “Brexit a Year Later: Historical Reflections on the Vote to Leave Europe,” Foreign Affairs, online edition (June 2017).

Stephen G. Gross “Introduction: European Integration across the Twentieth Century,” in the forum “Visions of European Integration across the Twentieth Century,” Contemporary European History 26/2 (2017), 205-207.

Stephen G. Gross, “Gold, Debt, and the Quest for Monetary Order: The Legacy of the Nazi Campaign to Integrate Europe in 1940,” in the forum “Visions of European Integration across the Twentieth Century,” Contemporary European History, 26/2 (2017), 287–309.

Stephen G. Gross, “Making Space for Sanctions: The Economics of German Natural Gas Imports from Russia, 1982 and 2014 Compared,” German Politics and Society 34/3 (2016), 1–25.

Stephen G. Gross, “Nazi Economic Expansion, Romanian Volksdeutsche, and the German-Romanian Chamber of Commerce, 1929–1941,” in Burkhard Olschowsky and Ingo Loose (eds.) Nationalsozialismus und Regionalbewusstsein im östlichen Europa. Ideologie – Machtausbau – Beharrung, (Oldenborg: De Gruyter, 2016), 173–189.

Stephen G. Gross and S. Chase Gummer, “Ghosts of the Habsburg Empire: Collapsing Currency Unions and Lessons for the Eurozone,” East European Politics and Societies 28/1 (2014), 252–65.

Stephen G. Gross, “War Finance (German Empire),” in Oliver Janz and Nicolas Apostolopolous (eds.) 1914-1918-Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, 2014. http://www.1914-1918-online.net/

Stephen G. Gross, “The German Economy and East-Central Europe: The Development of Intra-Industry Trade from Ostpolitik to the Present,” German Politics and Society 31/3 (2013), 83–105.

Stephen G. Gross, “Selling Germany in Southeastern Europe: Economic Uncertainty, Commercial Information, and the Leipzig Trade Fair 1920–1940,” Contemporary European History, 21/1 (2012), 19–39.

Stephen G. Gross, “Das Mitteleuropa-Institut in Dresden: Verknüpfung regionaler Wirtschaftinteressen mit deutscher Auslandskulturpolitik in der Zwischenkriegzeit,” Carola Sachse (ed.) “Mitteleuropa” und “Südosteuropa” als Planungsraum. Wirtschafts- und kulturpolitische Expertisen im Zeitalter der Weltkriege (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2010), 115–40.

Stephen G. Gross, “Confidence and Gold: German War Finance 1914–1918,” Central European History 42 (2009), 223–52.