Jake came to Colorado College as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2017 and made the transition to Assistant Professor in the History Department in 2019. He received his BA in Japanese History from Reed College and his PhD in European History from the University of Chicago. Jake teaches courses on the social,cultural,andintellectual history of twentieth-century Europe and is particularly interested in oppositional cultural milieus, conceptions of place, and capitalist modernity. Jake's regular courses include Mass Culture, Counterculture, Avant-garde; The Soviet Union; Race, Nation, and Empire; Fascism and Its Afterlives; In the Ruins of Modernity; and classes on urban history.
Jake has published essays on the emotional dynamics of European social movements, on official attempts to curb urban unrest, and on anarchist art milieus in late twentieth-century Berlin. He is currently working on a book manuscript, "Strangers in a Dead Land: Revolutionary Politics, Haunted Aesthetics, and the Eclipse of Modernity in North-Central Europe," which focuses on the experimental practices developed by European countercultures after the student movements of 1968 and argues that these groups played an important role in shifting patterns of spatial and temporal perception in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
