Charles Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor Emeritus of History at Harvard University and a resident faculty member at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies (CES). Maier was CES director from 1994-2001 and in the fall of 2006. He taught at Harvard from 1967 until 1975 and from 1981 until 2020. Maier co-directs the Weatherhead Research Cluster in Global History with Sven Beckert and Sugata Bose and has co-taught a graduate seminar with them since retirement.
Maier's research and teaching interests have included the history of political economy, collective memory and political justice, states and empires. Maier is currently working on an intellectual autobiography that focuses on historiographical issues and controversies encountered during a career of six decades. His most recent book, The Project-State and its Rivals: A New History of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2023. Other books include Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Harvard University Press, 2016); Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (Harvard University Press, 2012); Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (Harvard University Press, 2006); Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Pronceton University Press, 1997), The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Harvard University Press, 1988), In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton University Press, 1975, 1988, and 2015).
Maier is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations.
When I decided to become a historian of Europe long ago, Alexander Herzen spoke for me then in a text already 110 years old: “I do not know who could find in Europe happiness or rest, rest in the midst of an earthquake, happiness in the midst of a desperate struggle ... Why then do I stay? I stay because the struggle is here, because despite the blood and tears it is here that social problems are being decided, because it is here that suffering is painful, sharp, but articulate. The struggle is open, no one hides …” Europe has moved on; blood and tears flow more copiously elsewhere; and struggle is as intense in the United States – but the history of Europe still provides our paradigms and models.
