Ben Johnson, a history professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University Chicago, was named the recipient of the Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) 2024 German Residency at the University of Tübingen. The residency was announced during OAH’s 2024 Conference on American History in April.  

The OAH’s International Residency Program offers grants for travel, teaching, and research abroad. Johnson received the German Residency Program award, which supports short-term residencies at the University of Tübingen, and allows him the opportunity to lead a seminar on a U.S. history topic of his design. 

“The OAH is the main disciplinary organization for historians of the United States, so it’s gratifying to be selected by a group of my peers,” expressed Johnson.  

Johnson will lead a seminar on the topic “Race, Violence, and Memory in Modern United States History” during the summer to both undergraduate and graduate students.  

“This residency award allows for U.S. historians to broaden their perspectives – Americans are some of the only, maybe the only people, who can study the history of their own country by reading books and articles written by fellow Americans who did their professional training in the United States,” stated Johnson. 

“This experience will allow me to see what U.S. history looks like to advanced undergraduate and graduate students in Europe, and to learn from historians in Germany,” said Johnson.  

Johnson's primary areas of research and teaching include environmental history, North American borders, and Latino history.  He has taught courses on North American and world environmental history, natural disasters, immigration and ethnicity in the United States, and border and transnational history more generally. 

Johnson is also a co-founder of the public history group, Refusing to Forget, an award-winning educational non-profit dedicated to bringing public awareness to the 1910-1920 racial violence on the Mexico-Texas border. 

The OAH, founded in 1907, is the largest professional organization dedicated to teaching and studying American history. Based in Bloomington, Indiana, it is an external agency of Indiana University.  

Learn more about Benjamin H. Johnson and the Organization of American Historians. 

About the College of Arts and Sciences

The College of Arts and Sciences is the oldest of Loyola University Chicago’s 15 schools, colleges, and institutes. More than 150 years since its founding, the College is home to 20 academic departments and 37 interdisciplinary programs and centers, more than 450 full-time faculty, and nearly 8,000 students. The 2,000+ classes that we offer each semester span an array of intellectual pursuits, ranging from the natural sciences and computational sciences to the humanities, the social sciences, and the fine and performing arts. Our students and faculty are engaged internationally at our campus in Rome, Italy, as well as at dozens of University-sponsored study abroad and research sites around the world. Home to the departments that anchor the University’s Core Curriculum, the College seeks to prepare all of Loyola’s students to think critically, to engage the world of the 21st century at ever deepening levels, and to become caring and compassionate individuals. Our faculty, staff, and students view service to others not just as one option among many, but as a constitutive dimension of their very being. In the truest sense of the Jesuit ideal, our graduates strive to be “individuals for others.”