Austin Hoffman,

Austin is a first-year Ph.D. student in the history department at Duke. His regions of study include Germany and Eastern Europe specifically and the World more generally. He studies the environment, the military, nationalism, and colonialism in the German Empire during the nineteenth century and World War I. His research has focused primarily on the dichotomy between German soldiers and war propagandists fighting and living on the Eastern Front from 1914 until 1918. He researches how the environment impacted different groups of people during wartime and seeks to understand how these moments of drastic violence transformed the people living in these regions and the environment itself. Austin is fascinated by traditional military history, but wants to uncover how common soldiers, civilians, and observers experienced wartime environments in very different ways and why. 

Before coming to Duke, Austin earned his BA at University of California, Riverside and MA at California State University, Long Beach. He also received a Title VIII Fellowship from the U.S. Department of State in 2023 to study Lithuanian at Indiana University, Bloomington. 

Austin is currently Treasurer of the History Graduate Student Association. 

Austin maintains a membership with the German Studies Association.

Languages: German, Lithuanian (beginner)

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