History Professor Glenn Penny receives 2015 Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Humanities Research Award

Monday, March 9, 2015

Professor H. Glenn PennyH. Glenn Penny, professor in the Department of History, has been selected to receive the Distinguished Achievement in Arts and Humanities Research Award for 2015 from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development. 

Penny’s work explores the relationships between Europeans and non-Europeans from the eighteenth century to the present. He is particularly interested in Germans’ broad engagement with the wider world. His first book, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (2003), was a major intervention in the history of anthropology. It was the first comparative study of German ethnographic museums as well as the first in-depth analysis of the international market of material culture that took shape during the late nineteenth century. His second book, Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800 (2013), explores the striking sense of affinity for American Indians that has permeated German culture for two centuries. It shows how those affinities stem from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, a devotion to resistance, a longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of shared fate. It also uses those interconnections over the longue durée to directly engage the relationship between continuity and rupture in the metanarratives of modern German history and to underscore the perils of historians’ reliance on political periodizations.

In 2000, Penny's dissertation, Cosmopolitan Visions and Municipal Displays, won the Fritz Stern Prize from the German Historical Institute, and his first book received awards from the American Anthropological Association and the European Section of the Southern Historical Association. Penny has also been awarded fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, the Freie Universität in Berlin, the Frtiz-Thyssen Foundation, the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, the Center for Advanced Studies in Munich, the German Academic Exchange, the Social Science Research Council, and the Institute for European History in Mainz. 

Penny received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1999, and joined the UI faculty in 2003.


The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.