Sean Lawrence

Germany, Modern Europe, Modern Middle East, Environmental History

Teaching Fields

• Germany
• Modern Europe
• Modern Middle East
• Environmental History

Degrees

• Ph.D., Modern European History (University of California, Santa Cruz)
• M.A. European History (University of California, Santa Cruz)
• M.A. UNESCO World Heritage Studies (Brandenburg University of Technology)
• B.S. Political Science (Santa Clara University)

Research Interests

Sean is a modern historian specializing in German and the late Ottoman environmental history and political economy. His work examines how finance, empire, and environmental imaginaries reshaped landscapes across Turkey, Europe, the United States, and the broader Middle East from the late nineteenth century to the present. His research sits at the intersection of environmental history, political economy, and imperial and post-colonial studies, with particular attention to how transnational capital, state power, and local forms of ecological knowledge come together in large-scale projects underpinning global ecological change.

His current book project, Arcadia Lost: Business and Nature at the End of Empire, traces the early development of the Deutsche Bank–Ottoman alliance in Anatolia.  The book reconstructs the environmental engineering across central Anatolia through collaborative “transimperial” efforts between the late Ottoman government, Germany’s Deutsche Bank, and the European bondholders of the Ottoman Public Debt Administration. The book shows how these experiments in colonial political ecology generated techniques and discourses of “development” that later circulated far beyond the Ottoman world.

Before completing his Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, he earned an M.A. in European History there and an M.A. in UNESCO World Heritage Studies at the Brandenburg University of Technology, where he worked on issues of cultural landscape management and natural heritage conservation. Lawrence’s research is grounded in extensive work in German, Turkish, Ottoman, and French sources.

Lawrence has published on a range of topics including animal history, water and infrastructure in Turkey, urbanism, nostalgia, colonial public debt, and the politics of academic labor. He is committed to public-facing scholarship and media engagement. He has written for outlets in The Conversation and appeared in regional and national media, and increasingly focuses his teaching and archival work on connecting to broader public discussions of empire, environment, and historical memory.

At West Virginia University, Lawrence teaches courses in modern European, German, Middle Eastern, and environmental history at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. He welcomes inquiries from students interested in topics such as German imperialism, the modern Middle East, environmental history of empire, the history of capitalism and development, and projects that make use of non-English sources or cross European–Middle Eastern regional boundaries.

Courses Offered

• HIST 201: History of Ancient Times: Stone Age to the Fall of Rome
• HIST 207: Revolutionary Europe
• HIST 209: Twentieth Century Europe
• HIST 220: The Holocaust
  
• HIST 221: History of Modern Germany
• HIST 414: The Great War, 1914-1918
• HIST 421: Hitler and the Third Reich
• HIST 422: Twentieth-Century Germany from Weimar to Bonn
  
• HIST 717: Readings in Modern European History
• Hist 718: Seminar in Modern European History
• Hist 785: Readings in Environmental History
• HIST 786: Seminar in Environmental History

Publications

Books:

Arcadia Lost: Business and Nature at the End of Empire, [in review]

Chapters and Articles:

“Water’s Worth: Reconsidering Deutsche Bank’s 1907 Konya Plain Irrigation Project,” Environment and History [Forthcoming, 2026].

“A Rumeli City in Anatolia: Kemalist urbanism and environmental nostalgia in the design of early republican Ankara,” Environment, Space, Place 16, 2 (November 2025).

“Ticks carry decades of history in each troublesome bite,” The Conversation, June 2025.

“Ticks: Vectors of Modernity” in Nancy Jacobs, Faisal Husain, and Emily Wakild (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Global Animal History (Oxford University Press) [Forthcoming, 2026].

“Let the Recording Show: Documenting the voices of an academy in crisis” in Lisa M. Di  Bartolomeo and Kevin Gannon (eds.), The Campus Crisis Toolkit (SUNY Press, February 2026).

“Introduction” in Samir Mutawi, Time to Speak: Middle East Issues and Crisis (Yazori Press, 2014).