Richard F. Wetzell is a Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC. Trained at Swarthmore College, Columbia University and Stanford University, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard and has taught at the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, and the Catholic University of America. His research focuses on the intersection of law, science, and politics in modern Germany. His publications include Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (2000), Engineering Society (co-edited, 2012), and Crime and Criminal Justice in Modern Germany (2014).