Geoff Eley
Geoffrey Howard Eley is a British-born historian of Germany. He studied history at Balliol College, Oxford, and received his D.Phil from the University of Sussex in 1974. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the Department of History since 1979 and the Department of German Studies since 1997. He now serves as the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at Michigan.
Eley's early work focused on the radical nationalism in Imperial Germany and fascism, but has since grown to include theoretical and methodological reflections on historiography and the history of the political left in Europe.
Eley is particularly well known for his early study, The Peculiarities of German History, co-authored with David Blackbourn, which challenged the orthodoxy in German social history known as the Sonderweg thesis. His most successful book is Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000, which has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian, Korean, Turkish and Greek. Recently, he published a collection of essays on fascism called Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 with Routledge Press.Works
- Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945. London: Routledge, 2013
- After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.
- The Future of Class in History: What's Left of the Social?. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.
- A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
- Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980; new ed. 1991.
- Wilhelminismus, Nationalismus, Faschismus: Zur historischen Kontinuität in Deutschland. Münster: Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1991.
- Review article: "Labor History, Social History, Alltagsgeschichte: Experience, Culture, and the Politics of the Everyday--a New Direction for German Social History?" The Journal of Modern History Vol. 61, No. 2, June 1989
- From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past. London: Routledge, 1986.
- The Peculiarities of German History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
