William G. Gray Receives DAAD Prize in German and European Studies

Congratulations to Dr. William G. Gray of Purdue University, the recipient of the 2015 DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, for his outstanding academic work in the field of Politics and International Relations. Dr. Gray is one of the leading American Cold War historians, and profoundly knowledgeable on German politics and foreign relations. In this 25th anniversary year of German unification, his scholarship is especially relevant to AGI, an Institute that was founded over thirty years ago to study both West and East Germany.
William Glenn Gray is an Associate Professor of History at Purdue University. He began his scholarly life at Princeton, earning a bachelor’s in German Civilization and Politics in 1992. A DAAD fellowship then took him to the Freie Universität Berlin for study in history and literature. At Yale University, he studied for a doctorate under the guidance of noted business historian Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., and internationalist Paul M. Kennedy. His 1999 dissertation appeared in print in 2003 as Germany’s Cold War, a study of the global campaign to block East German recognition in the 1950s and 1960s. Afterward he co-edited the Encyclopedia of the Cold War and served on the project team for the Auswärtiges Amt Historian’s Commission, which released Das Amt und die Vergangenheit in 2010. Recent single-authored articles focus on circulating systems—currencies, nuclear proliferation, and weapons exports. He is currently wrapping up a lengthy book on Germany’s international roles in the 1960s and 1970s. Future work will shift emphasis to the “Global South,” with German investments in Brazil and Iran as special points of interest.

Dr. Gray is the 21st recipient of the DAAD Prize, whose central aim is to foster a new generation of American scholarship on Germany and encourage innovative contributions to the interdisciplinary scope of German Studies. AGI is grateful to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for its collaboration on and support of this prestigious award.