His lastest books are The Plots against Hitler (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a study of the anti-Nazi resistance in the German army, and Curse on this Country: The Rebellious Army of Imperial Japan (Cornell University Press), on the culture of insubordination in the Japanese Imperial Army and the roots of the Pacific War. Currently, he is studying military adventurism in the East Asian sphere in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and is a co-author in projects on the dynamics of unplanned massacres and the transnational history of espionage in the twentieth century. He is also writing a book on Nazi intelligence veterans in the Cold War.

In addition, Danny Orbach runs "The Owl", a blog on politics and history in Hebrew, and the podcast "Triple Agent" on intelligence and espionage. He also contributes regularly to the Israeli media on issues of military history and national security.

 

I received my Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2013, where I subsequently worked as a lecturer for four years. In 2017, I joined the history department at the Hebrew University as an Assistant Professor. My first book, Working in Hollywood: How the Studio System Turned Creativity Into Modern Labor, was published in 2018 with UNC Press. My new project examines African American consumer culture in the first half of the 20th century. I teach courses on African American History, the history of Capitalism, American Consumer Culture, and Labor History

Link to my new book: Working in Hollywood: How the Studio System Turned Creativity into Labor (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018)

including:

Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Late Medieval and Early Modern France

“Believe not Every Spirit": Demonic Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism,

and five Hebrew textbooks on the Protestant and Catholic reformations and on magic and Popular Culture in early modern Europe for The Open University of Israel.

Publications:

 

2017    Becoming a New Self: Practices of Belief in Early Modern Catholicism (University of Chicago Press), 232 pp.

2019    (ed. and Introduction) Into the Dark Night and Back: The Mystical Writings of Jean-Joseph Surin (Leiden and New York: Brill), 548 pgs

2020    Co-editor (with Andreas Krass), Die Jüden von Cherut (Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich), 214 pp.

2020    Co-editor (with Aya Elyada and Christian Wiese), Jews and Protestants from the Reformation to the Present (Berlin: De Gruyter), 280 pp.

2021    Co-editor (with Andreas Krass), Queer Jewish Lives between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine (Frankfurt: Transcript), 300 pp.

 

What are the meaning and characteristics of modernity? How distant are we from our "pre-modern" or "early-modern" ancestors? In my work I try to take apart and then put together again some key narratives that the modern west tells about itself. My first book was about the rise of class society and especially the middle class; and the second, about the emergence of the modern individual or modern self. In both cases I asked where do these narratives come from and what in fact were the historical developments that stood behind them (which were not at all those they claimed to represent).

Subsequently my work, which had begun with a focus on Britain, and has since expanded to much of Europe, especially France, Holland, Venice and Germany, has gone in two directions. One, a recent book with Professor Jonathan Sheehan of the University of California-Berkeley, is about the question of where does order and harmony come from in a world where god is no longer believed to take active care of it itself: this book is titled Invisible Hands: Self Organization and the Eighteenth Century. The other direction is the interface between art and history. This resulted in a book on a mysterious Dutch painter and the print revolution (Mr. Collier's Letter Racks: A Tale of Art and Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age), and in my current book-project on the interpretation of an extraordinary complex object in the treasury of the Saxon princes.
My current work expands through the study of material objects and art to a global perspective on the early modern period .

In addition I have a separate interest in the history of Palestine and especially Jerusalem since the eighteenth century, and of photography in the Middle East.

Another field of research in ancient history: politics, official ideology and propaganda, public opinion and imperial family  in early Imperial Rome. 

encapsulated either physically – in urban parks, nature reserves, or in urban window-boxes – or mentally, by imagining and reconstructing lost natural pasts. In addition, I am interested in botanical research and field explorations by Jewish scientists in mandatory Palestine and the early years of the state of Israel. In addition to my position at the History Department, I serve as an academic curator of the Herbarium of the National Natural History Collections. The collection includes more than 1.5 million specimens as well as a rich botanical library, botanical illustrations, and archival material. I am interested in advancing interdisciplinary approaches for collection-based research.I am currently working on two book projects. The first pursues the place of domestic plants in Victorian culture, and particularly focuses on the ways plants were perceived as individual living beings. My second project is a cultural history of coal in Victorian society, tentatively titled The Nature of Industry: Coal in 19 th -Century British Imagination. I earned my BSc from the Hebrew University (biology and “Amirim” honors’ program in the humanities) and MSc (Plant Studies). Subsequently, I completed my PhD in History of Science at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science in Tel Aviv University.