Harvard University History Department - Faculty: David Blackbourn

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Faculty

David Blackbourn is Coolidge Professor of History. He holds a PhD from Cambridge University, where he was also a research fellow, and taught at London University for sixteen years before coming to Harvard in 1992. He is a former chair of the History Department and is currently Director of the Center for European Studies. He is also a faculty associate of the Harvard University Center for the Environment. His interests and publications range over the social, political, cultural and environmental history of Germany in the modern period, i.e. principally since the eighteenth century. He has written on the connections between local and national politics, the idea of "theatrical politics", bourgeois culture, and popular religiosity in nineteenth-century Germany. A book coauthored with Geoff Eley set off a major debate in the early 1980s about the German "Sonderweg", and he has since written a general work on Germany in the long nineteenth century. His most recent book, The Conquest of Nature, is an attempt to write an environmental history that also takes into account political and economic power, technology, and the cultural history of landscape. He is currently working on a book provisionally titled Germany in the World, 1600-2000: A Transnational History.

David Blackbourn has taught courses that include Western Societies since 1650, modern European history, Germany 1871-1990, Germany in the World, 1600-2000, religion and popular culture in 19th-century Europe, and Max Weber in his Time. His graduate students work on a wide range of subjects in German social, cultural and political history since the late 18th century. He also welcomes applications from students interested in environmental history and German transnational history. Completed PhDs in the last twelve years have dealt with German perceptions of Russia, 1871-1914; the German occult movement and modernity, 1880-1941; cultural patronage in 19th-century Leipzig; 19th-century historical writing on the Thirty Years' War; the role of ethnic nationalist thinking in German liberalism; the criminal justice system in Berlin, 1890-1933; the oil industry in Austrian Galicia; Catholic-Protestant relations in 19th-century Germany; amateur historians in pre-1914 Berlin; the emigration of German Catholics to the USA; German-Indian intellectual-cultural exchanges in the 1920s and 30s; German-Japanese medical exchanges in the Imperial/Meiji period; violence and banditry in the German revolution of 1918; and German and Hungarian émigrés in 1848. Current PhD students are working on the removal of walls from 19th-century German towns, the photographing and filming of ‘shell-shock’ victims of World War One, German-Polish relations in Silesia, and German merchant communities in Chinese treaty ports.

Selected Publications

The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (2006)
The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 (1997, 2nd edition 2003)
Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 19th-century Germany (1994)
The German Bourgeoisie co-editor, with R. J. Evans (1991)
Populists and Patricians (1987)
The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-century Germany with G. Eley (1984)
Class, Religion, and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (1980)