Geoff Eley

Geoff Eley is the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History. Most recently he has published Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 (2013), and a volume edited with Bradley D. Naranch, German Colonialism in a Global Age (2014). His earliest works were Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (1980, 1991) and The Peculiarities of German History (German edn. 1980, English 1984) jointly authored with David Blackbourn. He is currently writing a general history of Twentieth-Century Europe. He is editor of Society, Culture, and the State in Germany 1870-1930 (1996), The "Goldhagen Effect" (1997), Citizenship and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Germany with Jan Palmowski (2007), and two anthologies, Becoming National with Ron Suny (1996) and Culture/Power/History with Nicholas Dirks and Sherry Ortner (1993). His general history of the Left in Europe, Forging Democracy, appeared in 2002, and a study of contemporary historiography, A Crooked Line, in 2005. With Keith Nield, he published The Future of Class in History: What’s Left of the Social? in 2007. He is also interested in contested images of the national past in British and German cinema since the 1960s. He joined the Michigan History Department in 1979. Professor Eley has been chair of the History Department since 2008. During 2004-07 he chaired the Department of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian Studies, and in Fall 2002 was Acting 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. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and University of Sussex, he previously taught at University of Cambridge. Geoff is on the Board of the GSA (2012-15) and also on the Editorial Board of the German Studies Review.

Fellowships
Guggenheim, German Marshall, U-M Institute for the Humanities, NEH. U-M awards include UMP Book Prize, Distinguished Graduate Mentoring, Michigan Humanities, Faculty Recognition.

Selected Publications

• Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 (2013)
• A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005)
• After the Nazi Racial State: Democracy and Difference in Germany and Europe, with Rita Chin, Heide Fehrenbach, and Atina Grossmann (AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009
• 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)

View complete listing of publications [PDF]

Affiliation(s)

• History

Award(s)

• Hudson Research Professor [1989]
• Previously Sylvia L. Thrupp Collegiate Professor of Comparative History [2000-2006]

Field(s) of Study

• Modern German History
• Modern British History
• Fascism
• Nationalism
• History of the Left
• Film andHistory
• Historiography
• Cultural Studies