Elisabeth "Lisa" Glaser

Elisabeth Glaser

Dr. Elisabeth "Lisa" Glaser, psychotherapist and historian, died on Thursday, September 23, 2010, after a long struggle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Ms. Glaser was born on June 28, 1954, in Cologne, Germany. She received the Dr. Phil. degree at the University of Cologne in 1984 and served as assistant professor of history in the Anglo-American Seminar there from 1984 until 1990. During that era, Cologne figured as the most important locus for American studies in the Federal Republic. Ms. Glaser taught a wide palette of courses, not only in her specialty, United States foreign relations, but also on economic affairs, immigration, and constitutional history.

Ms. Glaser served as Senior Fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington from 1991 until 1996 and also taught German history at Georgetown. She published her first book, on United States conquest and administration of the Philippines, in 1986. At the GHI she convened numerous international conferences and edited four additional books on German emigres and American political thought, transatlantic images and perceptions, American exceptionalism, and the Treaty of Versailles. The last-named work, for which she brought together the leading world experts on the end of World War I, remains the definitive work in the field.

Ms. Glaser also wrote 20 scholarly articles on subjects ranging from foreign trade, Chilean monetary policy, and J.P. Morgan & Company to Leo Strauss and Heinz Kohut.

While continuing her research on emigration from Nazi Central Europe, Ms. Glaser embarked on a second career as a psychotherapist in 1997 after settling permanently in Charlottesville. She graduated from the psychoanalytic psychotherapy training program at the Washington Psychoanalytic Foundation and became an advanced candidate at the New York Freudian Society.

She maintained a private practice in both Charlottesville and Richmond and developed a particular expertise in multiple personality disorder. Ever ready to put others first and astonishingly modest about her own accomplishments, she juggled two careers with aplomb, taught graduate courses on European history with her husband, and lavished attention on her two beloved stepchildren.

Ms. Glaser bore her affliction with ALS with characteristic sweetness, dignity, and courage. She continued seeing patients and writing until weeks before her death.

She leaves her husband, Stephen Schuker, a history professor at the University of Virginia; her stepchildren, Lauren Schuker of Los Angeles and Daniel Schuker of New Haven; two sisters and a brother-in-law; and four cherished nieces and nephews.


This obituary was originally published in the Daily Progress.