ELEY, Geoff(rey Howard) 1949-

PERSONAL:

Born May 4, 1949, in Burton-on-Trent, Staffordshire, England; immigrated to United States, 1979; son of Garnet James and Winnifred Ada (Boor) Eley; married Eleanor Harriet Levy (a health educator), January, 1972; children: Sarah, Anna. Education: Balliol College, Oxford, B.A. (with first class honors), 1970; University of Sussex, D.Phil., 1974; Cambridge University, M.A., 1975; Oxford University, M.A., 1981.

ADDRESSES:

Home—1256 Ferdon, Ann Arbor, MI 48104. Office—Department of History, University of Michigan, Haven Hall, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of Wales, University College of Wales, Swansea, research fellow in history, 1973-74; University of Keele, Keele, England, lecturer in history, 1974-75; Cambridge University, Emmanuel College, Cambridge, England, fellow and director of studies in history, founder and convener of social history seminar, and member of college governing body, all 1975-79; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, assistant professor, 1979-81, associate professor, 1981-86, professor of history, 1986—, chair of department fellowship committee, 1982-83, and of department fellowship and admissions committee, 1984-86. Director of Program on Comparative Study of Social Transformations, 1988—.

MEMBER:

Conference Group on Central European History (member of executive board, 1982—), Council on European Studies, Center for Russian and East European Studies, Center for Western European Studies (chair of committee on international cooperation, 1982-83, and of committee on lectures and conferences, 1986—), Past and Present Society, Royal Historical Society (fellow), Society of German Historians in Britain (founding chair, 1979).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Grant for research in West Germany from Social Science Research Council, 1978; Rackham grants, 1982, 1985, and 1988; National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, 1983-84; Rackham fellowship, 1985-86.

WRITINGS:

Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1980, revised with a new introduction, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1990.

(Editor, with David G. Blackburn, and contributor) Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung: Die gescheiterte buergerliche Revolution von 1848, Ullstein Materialien (Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany), 1980, published as The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1984.

From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past, Allen & Unwin (Boston, MA), 1986.

(Editor, with William A. Hunt) Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the Work of Christopher Hill, Verso (New York, NY), 1988.

(Editor, with Nicholas B. Dirks and Sherry B. Ortner) Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1994.

(Editor, with Ronald Grigor Suny) Becoming National: A Reader, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(Editor) Society, Culture, and the State of Germany, 1870-1930, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1996.

(Editor) The Goldhagen Effect: History, Memory, Nazism—Facing the German Past, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 2000.

Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2002.

(Editor, with James Terallack) Wilhelminism and Its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1980-1930: Essays for Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, Berghahn Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor of chapters to books, including Society and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany, edited by Richard J. Evans, Croom Helm (London, England), 1978; Militaer und Militarismus in der Weimarer Republik, edited by Klaus-Juergen Mueller and Eckardt Opitz, Droste Verlag (Dusseldorf, Germany), 1978; International Handbook of Historiography: Contemporary Research and Theory, edited by George Iggers and Harold Parker, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1980; Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany before 1914, edited by Paul Kennedy and Anthony Nicholls, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1981; Culture, Ideology, and Politics, edited by Raphael Samuel and Gareth Stedman Jones, Routledge & Kegan Paul (London, England), 1983; Fascists and Conservatives in Europe, edited by Martin Blinkhorn, Allen & Unwin (Boston, MA), 1987; Ukrainian-Jewish Relations in Historical Perspective, edited by Peter J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster, Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1988; Chance und Illusion/Labor in Retreat: Studien zur Krise der west-europaeischen Gesellschaft in den dreissiger Jahren/Studies on the Social Crisis in Interwar Western Europe, edited by Helmut Gruber and Wolfgang Maderthaner, Europa, 1988; E. P. Thompson: Critical Debates, edited by Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1990.

Contributor of articles and reviews to history journals. Member of editorial board of Social History, 1976—; review editor of Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1980-86; review associate of New German Critique, 1981—.

SIDELIGHTS:

A renowned scholar of German history, Geoff Eley has written, edited, and contributed to important works about modern European history. Among them are studies of German unification, the pre-World War II German bourgeoisie, Nazism, the reunification of Germany, and European Socialists. Over a twenty-year period, Eley worked on his 700-page study, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000, in which he chronicles the emergence of democracy in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and focuses on how leftist movements influenced this development. It is, according to Leslie Derfler of History, "a remarkable and original achievement, all the more so inasmuch as Eley does not limit his coverage to leftists in the three or four largest European countries but embraces the entire continent." Although an Economist critic expressed some reservations, stating that Eley has a bias toward socialism, he praised the work as "straightforward and often insightful," particularly in its treatment of "unknown" contributors: "One of the book's great virtues is that many of the men and women, especially those of lower-class birth who furthered the cause, are given biographies and space." Noting that Eley "writes eloquently," Library Journal reviewer Thomas A. Karel called the work "an impressive work of scholarship" and a "worthy successor" of other seminal works of its kind.

Eley once told CA: "As a late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century German historian by immediate training, I have tried to combine my specialized interests with more general commitments to cross-national comparative analysis and theoretical discussion. Since publishing my first book, in fact, I have been increasingly active in these more general directions, with particular interests in comparative state formation and recent theories of the state, in the related discussions of culture and ideology, and in more specific literatures on the sociology of intellectuals and popular political mobilization. I have also been involved in debates concerning the relationship of social history and politics, which since the late-1970s have reflected the general shift in the social sciences from a 'society-centered' perspective to one which acknowledges the autonomy of politics and the importance of the state. My current interest in nationalism is linked very closely to these general intellectual developments."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 1998, review of Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870-1930, p. 213.

Central European History, April, 1996, review of Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, p. 541.

Comparative Studies in Society and History, October, 1997, David G. Horn, review of Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, pp. 734-741.

Economist (U.S.), July 6, 2002, "Some Uncommon Common People," review of Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000.

European History Quarterly, October, 1997, David Kirby, review of Becoming National: A Reader, pp. 588-591.

Foreign Affairs, March, 1997, Francis Fukuyama, review of Becoming National, pp. 175-176.

German Studies Review, February, 2002, Richard S. Levy, review of The "Goldhagen Effect": History, Memory, Nazism—Facing the German Past, pp. 177-178.

History, winter, 1997, review of Society, Culture, and State in Germany, p. 77; summer, 2002, Leslie Derfler, review of Forging Democracy, p. 158.

Journal of Modern History, March, 1990, review of From Unification to Nazism: Reinterpreting the German Past, p. 200; December, 1996, Elizabeth Harvey, review of Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History: Regulating the Social: The Welfare State and Local Politics in Imperial Germany, pp. 1021-1023; June, 1998, Peter Fritzsche, review of Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, pp. 496-499.

Library Journal, July, 2002, Thomas A. Karel, review of Forging Democracy, p. 95.

Seventeenth-Century News, spring, 1991, review of Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the Work of Christopher Hill, p. 1.

Social History, October, 1996, Chris Waters, review of Culture/Power/History, pp. 356-359; October, 1998, Greg Eghigian, review of Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, pp. 340-342.

Southern Humanities Review, summer, 1990, review of Reviving the English Revolution, p. 279.

Times Literary Supplement, May 2, 1980, review of Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck.*