He is a professor of modern European history at The University of Alabama at Birmingham and teaches courses on modern German history and the Holocaust.
Wiesen's book West German Industry & The Challenge of the Nazi Past, 1945-1955 (2001) won the Hagley Prize in Business History in 2002.
He is also c-oeditor of Selling Modernity: Advertising in 20th Century Germany (2007) and author of Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich (2011).