Robert Gerwarth - Biography#

Educated in Germany and Britain, Gerwarth holds the Chair of Modern History at University College Dublin (UCD), a post to which he was appointed in 2010. He has also held visiting fellowships at SciencesPo (Paris), the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Harvard, the EUI, the ZIF (Bielefeld), the Herder Institute (Marburg) and at The University of Western Australia. At UCD, he founded the interdisciplinary Centre for War Studies (www.ucd.ie/warstudies). The Centre has since established itself a globally leading institution in the field of war studies (broadly defined) and frequently organises international conferences and research seminars with distinguished academics.

He graduated from Berlin’s Humboldt Universität, receiving the highest first that can be awarded by a German university. He completed his PhD at Oxford University in 2003. The PhD thesis was accepted for publication by OUP, awarded the Fraenkel Prize, and published in German translation. After a departmental lectureship at Balliol College Oxford, he was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at Oxford University.

To date, he has published two research monographs (with a third, contracted with Penguin, close to completion); five edited books (all with OUP or CUP); five special journal issues; and thirty-three articles in peer-reviewed journals or peer-reviewed books. Gerwarth’s published output reflects his primary research interests, focusing on German history in its broader European and global contexts in the period between 1870 and 1945.

His second monograph, the first scholarly biography of the chief organizer of the Holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich, was published to great critical acclaim by Yale University Press in late 2011 and was listed as a “Book of the Year” in various newspapers. His books have been translated into (or are contracted to appear in) more than twenty languages.

His forthcoming monograph (The Vanquished: Europe and the Aftermath of the Great War) is also contracted to appear simultaneously in German, Dutch, French, Italian, Czech, Greek, and Spanish. In addition, Gerwarth is the general editor of a twenty-volume book series for Oxford University Press, entitled "The Greater War, 1911-23".