Associate Professor Sheryl Kroen received her BA from Princeton University (1984) and her MA (1987) and Ph.D. (1992) from the University of California at Berkeley in Modern European History. She joined the UF Faculty in 1994 after teaching at Pomona College.
She has published Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815-1830 (University of California Press, 2000), a cultural history of the legacy of the French Revolution under the Restored Bourbon Monarchs and articles on nineteenth century French political culture, the history of consumer capitalism in Europe, and more recently, articles related to her current project on post-World War II Western Europe.
She is in the final stages of a new book, The Recovery: the Reinvention of Europe and the West after WWII. Working from the pamphlets, photographs, films, and traveling exhibits that comprised the multi-national, multimedia information campaign by which the governments of West Germany, Britain and France explained and enacted The Recovery for its citizens, this book explores the process by which the Economic Recovery (or what historians call "the economic miracle" of the postwar period) offered the occasion to produce "the political and ideological miracle" of re-presenting Europe, within five years after the fall of Hitler, as the vanguard of Western Civilization. This intellectual and cultural history of The Recovery explores the foundation of the postwar world, including the birth of the European Union and the Atlantic Alliance, within the long history of liberalism and capitalism that were re-invented in this post-traumatic moment.
Sheryl Kroen has received fellowships from the Fulbright, the French Government (Chateaubriand Fellowship), the NEH, the Humboldt Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the ACLS Burkhardt, as well as several grants from the University of Florida. She has two spent years working on her latest book at the Columbia Society for Fellows in Paris and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. In the spring of 2010 she gave 20 seminars on The Recovery as a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Vercelli in Italy.
At the University of Florida she regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in modern European cultural and intellectual history including Society and the Sexes in Modern Europe, The History of Consumer Culture, The Cultural History of Capitalism, and most recently, in anticipation of her next book, a series of courses exploring Writing Women's Lives.