The best part of teaching history majors at Lynchburg is helping them transform from students who know a lot about history to historians in their own right… No matter what path our majors pursue — education, government, business, professional school — the research tools are critical to their success.
Professor of History
John Franklin East Professor of Humanities
Chair of the History Department
In 2020, Brian Crim got a call from a Los Angeles-based media company that had partnered with Amazon Prime on a short documentary to promote the TV series “Hunters.” The series tells the fictional — albeit “ripped from the headlines” — story of Nazi hunters living in New York City in the 1970s.
Crim, a history professor at the University of Lynchburg, specializes in World II and studies of the Holocaust, and has written several books on the subjects. As it turned out, “Hunters” creator David Weil used Crim’s 2017 book, “Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State,” as source material.
“Much of [the series] is fictionalized, of course, but the truth is almost as good as the myth,” Crim said. “My book was one of those consulted and that put me on the list of scholars to do the documentary.”
A film and TV buff and self-described “news junkie,” Crim also authored “Planet Auschwitz: Holocaust Representation in Science Fiction and Horror Film and Television,” and co-hosts the podcast, “Lies Agreed Upon,” which examines how Hollywood interprets its past.
“The more I learned about history, which of course became my career, the more I realized how much pop culture acted as the primary medium for interpreting the past for the public,” Crim said. “Culture reflects our contemporary fears, hopes, obsessions, and values.”
In 2022, Crim launched a new podcast with history department colleague Dr. Christie Vogler called “Hornet Humanities,” which features faculty and students from the School of Humanities. He’s also working on a new book, “In the Shadows: Spy Fiction after 9/11.”
For research, he traveled to the University of Oxford in England, where he pored through the John le Carré archives.
“He is probably the most popular and important spy novelist, and I used his old manuscripts to see how he responded to 9/11 in his writing,” Crim said.
Learn More About Brian
- New podcast looks at how Hollywood interprets the past
- History professor appears on video promoting Amazon Prime series ‘Hunters’
- History professor writes about life on ‘Planet Auschwitz’
- The human history of the Holocaust
- ‘Unrepentant Nazis’ subject of Nov. 14 faculty lecture
- Smithsonian Magazine features Lynchburg professor’s book as a new favorite
- ‘Project Paperclip’ cited in New Yorker article
- C-SPAN Cities Tour highlights Lynchburg College
- New books tell Cold War-era stories of U.S., Germany
- Dr. Crim receives Mednick award
- Dr. Crim selected for Holocaust seminar
