Professor

David Gordon Blackbourn

Vanderbilt University
Historian; Educator
Area
Humanities and Arts
Specialty
History
Elected
2007

Professor David Gordon Blackbourn is the Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Chair and Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He taught for twenty years at Harvard University (1992-2012), where he was Coolidge Professor of History, and before that was on the faculty of London University (1976-1992). He has produced significant work in many different areas of modern German history. An early work co-written with Geoff Eley helped to undermine the then dominant historical paradigm of Germany's special path, or Sonderweg. His six books include works on modern mass politics, a microhistory of popular religiosity, and a work of synthesis on Germany in the long nineteenth century. His most recent work is "The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany," which  won the the George Mosse Prize for Cultural History and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Prize for Best Book in Forest and Conservation History. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Historical Society, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, among others. His work has appeared in 11 languages. His next book will be called "Germany in the World,1500-2000". 

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