Geoff Eley

Who is Geoff Eley?

Geoffrey Howard Eley is a British-born historian of Germany. He studied History at the Balliol College of Oxford University and received his D.Phil from the University of Sussex in 1974. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor since 1979 as professor of History and, since 1997, of German Studies. He now serves as the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor at that institution.

Eley's early work focused on the radical nationalism in Imperial Germany, 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 new orthodoxy in German social history known as the Sonderweg thesis. However, 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.