Andrew Walgren

Dr. Andrew Walgren's research broadly focuses on the relationship between mass media, popular culture, the military, and the state in the United States during the First World War. Specifically, he examines the complex web of cultural institutions, actors, and organizations that transformed America's national cultural apparatus during World War I, including the Committee on Public Information, the Stage Women's War Relief, Irving Berlin, the Over There Theatre League, and James Reese Europe. His scholarship addresses themes of cultural democracy, sensory history, the "culture industry," militarization, mass media, and nationalism. Walgren's abiding interest is the dialectical relationship between the U.S. military and cultural institutions. 

Dr. Walgren's work has been recognized and supported by the New York Public Library, the University of Alabama's Frances S. Summersell Center for Study of the South, the University of South Carolina, George Mason University, and the American Cultural Association. In 2020, his scholarship was awarded the Wilfrid and Rebecca Callcott Foundation Award for Excellence in Historical Research. He has presented his research at the Society for Military History, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the South Carolina Historical Association, and the American Cultural Association. In addition, Walgren's teaching has been recognized by the University of South Carolina's Bridge Humanities Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship program, where he taught seminar-style courses in ethics, advocacy, and public policy. 

Dr. Walgren has forthcoming chapters in the Routledge History of the First World War and ‘That Pageant Terrible’: Cultural Representations of the African American War Experience. These chapters discuss, respectively, the historiographical debates on the United States' role in the Great War and the story of Noble Sissle's biography of James Reese Europe, the trailblazing bandleader of the Harlem Hellfighters. His dissertation, "Media Combat: The Great War and the Transformation of American Culture," is currently under revision in preparation for publication.

In his spare time, Walgren enjoys old-school gaming, camping, walking his two beloved dogs, and suffering as a fan of Arsenal football.  

Courses taught:

HIST 2111: American History to 1865

HIST 2112: American History since 1865

HIST 3073: Modern America, 1945-Present

HIST 3752: War and Society since 1500

HIST 4072: The U.S. Civil War

HIST 4400: The Age of World Wars I and II