Department of History - University of Michigan

Geoff Eley

Department Chair, Professor
Ph.D. University of Sussex, U.K., 1974

Other U of M Affiliation:
German Department; faculty associate Film and Video Studies Program.

Contact Information:
University of Michigan
1029G Tisch Hall
Phone: 734-763-2289
Second Office: 1664 Haven Hall
Second Phone: 734-764-6373
E-mail: ghe@umich.edu

Field(s) of Study:
German, British, modern Europe, historiography, cultural studies. Research: European Left, 1848-present; German liberalism 1848-1933; cinema and the construction of the national past; conceptions of class in history and politics; nationalism, fascism, state formation

Biography:
Geoff Eley is the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History. He has published widely in German history of the 19th and 20th centuries, including his first book, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (1980, new edn. 1991) and a general reinterpretation of German history jointly authored with David Blackbourn called The Peculiarities of German History (German edn. 1980, English 1984). His essays in the German field range widely from the later 19th century down to the present. He is currently finishing another book on liberalism, popular politics, and the creation of the German national state between the 1860s and the 1890s. On a broader front, he is preparing a volume of his essays on historiography and theory called History Made Conscious: The Politics of the Past at the Start of the Twenty-First Century. His edited volumes include Society, Culture, and the State in Germany 1870-1930 (1996), The “Goldhagen Effect” (1997), and (with Jan Palmowski) Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany (2007). With Ron Suny he edited a Reader on Nationalism called Becoming National (1996) and with Nicholas Dirks and Sherry Ortner a Reader on Social Theory called Culture/Power/History (1993). His general history of the Left in Europe, Forging Democracy, appeared in 2002, and a study of the shifting popularity of social history and cultural history during the past four decades, A Crooked Line, was published in 2005. A jointly authored book with Keith Nield, The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social?, appeared in February 2007. His longer-term project is a book on the contested images of the national past in British and German cinema between the 1960s and the present. In addition to German history, his teaching interests include Europe since 1945, nationalism, cultural studies, and historiography. He joined the History Department at Michigan in 1979. During 2004-07 he chaired the Department of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian Studies, and in Fall 2002 acted as Director of the Program in Film and Video Studies (now Department of Screen Arts and Cultures). For many years he directed CSST, the Program on the Comparative Studies of Social Transformations. He previously taught at the University of Cambridge and was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and the University of Sussex.

Selected Publications:
The Future of Class in History: What's Left of the Social? with Keith Nield (The University of Michigan Press, 2007)

Historia de la izquierda in Europa 1850-2000 (Barcelona: Critica, 2006)

A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005)

Forjando a Democracia. A história da esquerda na Europa, 1850-2000 (Sao Paulo: Editoria Fundacao Perseu Abramo, 2005). Portuguese edition of Forging Democracy:The History of the Left in Europe,

Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)

The Goldhagen Effect. History, Memory, Nazism: Facing the German Past, Editor (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)

Becoming National: A Reader, ed. with Ronald Grigor Suny (New York: OUP, 1996) Society, Culture, and the State in Germany 1870-1930, ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996)

Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. with Nicholas B. Dirks and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993)

Reshaping the German Right (London and New Haven: Yale UP, 1980; new ed. 1991)

Wilhelminismus, Nationalismus, Faschismus: Zur historischen Kontinuität in Deutschland (Münster: Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1991)

From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past (London: Routledge, 1986)

The Peculiarities of German History, with David Blackbourn (Oxford: OUP, 1984)

“Finding the People’s War: Film, British Collective Memory, and World War II,” American Historical Review, 105, 5 (June 2001), 818-838

“Between Social History and Cultural Studies: Interdisciplinarity and the Practice of the Historian at the End of the Twentieth Century,” in Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (eds.), Historians and Social Values (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), 93-109

“Culture, Nation, and Gender,” in Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (eds.), Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 27-40

“Farewell to the Working Class?” (with Keith Nield), International Labor and Working-Class History, 57 (Spring 2000), 1-30 and “Reply: Class and the Politics of History,” 76-87

“Problems with Culture: German History after the Linguistic Turn,” Central European History, 31, 3 (1998), 197-227

“From Welfare Politics to Welfare States: Women and the Socialist Question,” in Helmut Gruber and Pamela Graves (eds.), Women and Socialism / Socialism and Women: Europe between the Two World Wars (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), 516-46

“Cultural Socialism, the Public Sphere, and the Mass Form: Popular Culture and the Democratic Project, 1900 to 1934,” in David E. Barclay and Eric D. Weitz (eds.), Between Reform and Revolution: German Socialism and Communism from 1840 to 1990 (New York and London: Berghahn Books, 1998), 315-40

“Is All the World a Text?”, in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences, ed. Terrence McDonald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996)

“Watching Schindler’s List: Not the Last Word”, with Atina Grossmann, New German Critique, 71 (1997)

Current Projects:
Liberalism, the National State, and Popular Politics in Germany, 1860-1900. A study of political change in Germany between the creation of the first German state in 1867-71 and the dissolution of liberal politics in the 1890s.

The Twentieth Century, 1914-2000, Volume V of the new Cambridge History of Europe. The 20th-century volume in the newly launched Cambridge History of Europe.

Cinema and the Construction of the National Past. Long-term project.

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