Timothy Nunan ’08

I am currently a “Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter” (Lecturer) and the leader of a “Freigeist” Research Group at the Arbeitsbereich Globalgeschichte at the Free University of Berlin. There, I am working on a book project focusing on the trajectory of Islamism in Iran and Afghanistan during the Cold War. Prior to my current position, I was a postdoctoral scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. During that time, I revised my doctoral dissertation on international development and humanitarianism in Afghanistan during the Cold War into a book, published with Cambridge University Press in 2016 as Humanitarian Invasion: Global Development in Cold War Afghanistan. Following my time at Princeton, I spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Germany, followed by graduate work at the University of Oxford, where I was a Rhodes Scholar. The direction of my recent research might seem unexpected for a German major, but when I reflect on my time at Princeton, I think the intellectual training I received in the German Department prepared me particularly well even for directions not specifically Germanic. Professors like Nikolaus Wegmann, Michael Jennings, Tom Levin, and Devin Fore—even if they were working on topics distant from my own obsessions—all provided models of what it means to be an engaged teacher and scholar.