The Department of History

Katherine Pence began teaching in the History Department at Baruch College in the Fall of 2002. Originally from Oakland, California, she got a B.A. in history from Pomona College in Claremont, California.  She then received her Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of Michigan where she studied German gender history with advisors Geoff Eley and Kathleen Canning.  Her courses reflect her areas of specialty in German and European history, history of the Cold War, gender history, the history of consumption, and other themes in cultural history.

Professor Pence’s book, Rations to Fashions: Gender and Consumer Politics in Cold War Germany, will be published with Cambridge University Press.  She has also co-edited a volume of essays with Paul Betts of Sussex University in England entitled Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics, with the University of Michigan Press.  She has also written a number of articles for French, German, British and American books and journals.  Pence’s current research focuses on cultural aspects of East and West German trade relations with decolonizing countries in Africa and elsewhere in the 1950s and 1960s. 

At Baruch College, Pence is the faculty mentor for the History Club, which she helped to establish with a group of history students.  She is also the director and co-founder of a Women’s Studies program and minor at the college. 

Before arriving at Baruch College, Pence taught for three years at Adrian College, a small liberal arts school in Michigan. She spent one year as a James Bryant Conant post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies. Her research has been funded by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Friedrich Ebert Research Foundation, PSC-CUNY grants, a Eugene Lang Fellowship, and a Whiting Fellowship awarded for outstanding teaching.  She lives in Brooklyn.

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