David Blackbourn

Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair of History Emeritus
Professor of History

David Blackbourn has written on a wide range of subjects within the field of German history. He is the author of eight books: Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany (1980); The Peculiarities of German History (with Geoff Eley, 1984); Populists and Patricians (1987); Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany (1993), winner of the Hans Rosenberg Prize; History of Germany 1780-1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (2nd edn, 2002); The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany (2006), winner of the George Mosse Prize, the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Prize in Forest and Conservation History, and the H-Soz-Kult Prize for Best Book in European History; Landschaften der deutschen Geschichte: Aufsätze zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2016); and Germany in the World: A Global History 1500-2000 (2023), winner of the DAAD/German Studies Association Prize in History and Social Sciences. He is also the co-editor of two volumes. David Blackbourn is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an International Fellow of the British Academy. A former President of the Friends of the German Historical Institute Washington and a trustee of the National Humanities Center, he has served on the editorial boards of Past and Present, Central European History, and German Politics and Society. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, among others, and his work has appeared in eleven languages.

David Blackbourn has taught courses on Western Civilization, modern European history, modern German history, the history of religion and popular piety, environmental history, and the cinema and history.