Oscar Lansen

Oscar Lansen is Teaching Professor of History, and the teacher licensure content advisor for Secondary Comprehensive Social Studies licensure degrees and graduate certificates at UNC Charlotte. He also co-chairs the University’s commencement exercises.

Oscar specializes in the social history of war and conflict as well as in history pedagogy. His historical scholarship focuses on Jewish refugees from Nazism to the Netherlands and the Dutch West Indies. He is currently completing a monograph on the fate of Austrian, German, and Dutch Jewish internees on the Netherlands Antilles; and the ensuing power struggles between the Colonial and Sephardic elite for relief and justice.  His research has been published in Dutch, English, and Spanish.

Oscar’s pedagogical research focuses on teaching the contested and unmasterable past; as well as the shaping of the historical narrative in society. He is authoring comparative study on the relation of history education and visions of nationhood in autocratic, semi-democratic and democratic societies (the US study has been published). In collaboration with his European colleagues, Oscar is also working on the (effective) Holocaust educational methodology in combating prejudice and hatred in Germany and the United States. He has served as content and pedagogy consultant for the Holocaust curriculum for the State of North Carolina and is contributing to a forthcoming UNESCO curriculum on antisemitism. His work on pedagogy has been published in Dutch and English.

Oscar teaches a variety of regular, honors, methods, and teacher education courses on the Holocaust, Nazi Germany, and the experience of modern conflict. His didactics focus on visual-spatial analysis, active learning in large lecture settings, disciplinary skill acceleration under first time in college students, and equitable learning modalities in diverse course settings. Oscar is a founding member of the Charlotte Teacher institute and the History Freshmen Learning Community. He also served on the student policy equity task force, and helped establish a need-based undergraduate study abroad scholarship in history.

Oscar has served the university and community at large in various administrative and governance roles amongst others as chair of the Honors Council, the College Curriculum Committee, and the Commencement Committee. He also served as long-term departmental director of undergraduate studies and as its honors director. Oscar frequently lectures in public school classrooms, consults with museums on Holocaust-related exhibits and schools on curriculum/pedagogical innovations, and speaks at community events as part of his efforts to bring history to the community.