He received his undergraduate degree in History at Swarthmore College, a small Quaker liberal arts school near Philadelphia, and his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1992. He has been teaching at Washington State since 1991 and specializes in courses on the world wars, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, and how societies remember and commemorate war and genocide. He is the 2018 recipient of the WSU Sahlin Faculty Award for Excellence in Instruction.