David Petruccelli

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As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a detective. But life has a way of taking unexpected turns, and my path instead led me to graduate school. Historical research draws upon my interest in investigation without its physical dangers. And if I was not to become a detective, I could still study them.

My dissertation examines the development of criminal police forces – mostly plainclothes detectives dealing with “ordinary” crimes such as robbery and murder – in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and explores the emergence of the International Criminal Police Commission (now Interpol) in interwar Central Europe. I will be conducting research in Austria, Germany, Poland, and Switzerland during the 2011-12 academic year. My committee includes Timothy Snyder, Adam Tooze, and Patrick Cohrs.

I came to this topic via my undergraduate honors thesis, written under Omer Bartov at Brown University, which examined the detectives of the German Criminal Police during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.

More broadly, I am interested in modern European history, especially integrating Eastern and Central Europe into views of the continent. During the 2010-11 academic year, I was a co-organizer of Yale’s Modern Europe Colloquium.