135. Editing Early America with Nadine Zimmerli

Dr. Nadine Zimmerli recently joined The University of Virginia Press as its editor of History and Social Sciences books. A former editor at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, Zimmerli is a historian of 20th century Europe by training. She is also a native of Germany, having grown up in East Germany in the years surrounding the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

In this episode, Dr. Zimmerli shares with Jim Ambuske what it was like to grow up in East Germany before reunification in 1990 and how her family's own history inspired her professional career as a historian and editor. You'll also hear how she knew from a young age that she wanted to be an editor, her sense of the big questions that have shaped and reshaped our understanding of the early American past., and the opportunities she sees at the UVA Press. 

About Our Guest:

Dr. Nadine Zimmerli is the Editor of History and Social Sciences at The University of Virginia Press. She holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and began her editorial career at the University of Wisconsin Press as a project assistant for the George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History. Previously, she was Associate Editor of Books at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture, where she edited award-winning books such as Susanah Shaw Romney’s New Netherland Connections: Intimate Networks and Atlantic Ties in Seventeenth-Century America, and Robert G. Parkinson’s The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution.

About Our Host:

Jim Ambuske, Ph.D. leads the Center for Digital History at the Washington Library. A historian of the American Revolution, Scotland, and the British Atlantic World, Ambuske graduated from the University of Virginia in 2016. He is a former Farmer Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia Law Library. At UVA Law, Ambuske co-directed the 1828 Catalogue Project and the Scottish Court of Session Project.  He is currently at work on a book about emigration from Scotland in the era of the American Revolution as well as a chapter on Scottish loyalism during the American Revolution for a volume to be published by the University of Edinburgh Press.