Professor Lekan teaches undergraduate surveys of European civilization and modern Germany, as well as specialized undergraduate courses and seminars on environmental history, the urban experience in modern Europe, and Nazi social history. He also leads graduate seminars in environmental history, European history, and dissertation prospectus writing. His first book, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2004), explores the relationship between nature conservation, landscape planning, and national identity in the Wilhelmine, Weimar, and National Socialist periods of German history. He has also recently completed a volume of essays (co-edited with Thomas Zeller) entitled Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History (Rutgers University Press, 2005).

Current Activities

I have begun research and writing for a new book, Sublime Consumption: Nature Tourism, Outdoor Leisure, and Environmentalism in Twentieth-Century Germany, which explores how the tourist industry shaped popular visions of nature, homeland, and the environment during a period of unprecedented material affluence, mobility, and state intervention in the economy and society . Using noted American sociologist Thorstein Veblen's concept of “conspicuous consumption” as a starting point, Sublime Consumption analyzes the development of German “taste” for sublime nature and the transformation of the Romantic nature ideal from a symbol of bourgeois privilege into a right of the masses. I argue that modern German environmentalism, including the present-day green movement, was a byproduct of the expansion and globalization of the country’s leisure class, which tended to view nature as a place to re-create the self and society, rather than to work. This leisured perspective transformed many Germans into vocal advocates of nature conservation and environmental protection, but also tended to privilege white-collar recreational interests over the economic or social needs of manual laborers at home or indigenous peoples abroad. The book engages questions posed by scholars of environmental history, consumer society, regional geography, and postcolonialism. I am also working on a series of review essays and articles that compare the culture and practice of European and U.S. nature conservation and regional planning between 1890 and 1945.

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