Till van Rahden

Till van Rahden teaches modern and contemporary history at the Université de Montréal where he held the Canada Research Chair in German and European Studies from 2006 to 2016. He has held fellowships from the “Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften,” the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, the “Leibniz Institute for European History”, Mainz, the “Morphomata Center for Advanced Studies,” and the “Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen”, Vienna. He specializes in European history since the Enlightenment and is interested in the tension between the elusive promise of democratic equality and the recurrent presence of diversity and moral conflicts. In 1993, he received an M.A. in American history from The Johns Hopkins University, and in 1999, he completed his dissertation at the University of Bielefeld which was published in 2000 as Juden und andere Breslauer with Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht and received the “Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History.”  His recent publications include two monographs, Jews and other Germans: Civil Society, Religious Diversity and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860-1925 (UW Press, 2008) and Demokratie: Eine gefährdete Lebensform (Campus, 2019). He serves on the Advisory Board of the George L. Mosse Series Series in the History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas (University of Wisconsin Press) and the Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute (Oxford University Press).