- Political Crisis and Radical Change in Recent History (FRSEMR 72L)
Charles Maier is Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University and 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. Maier co-directs the Weatherhead Center Initiative in Global History (WIGH) with Sven Beckert and Sugata Bose. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Currently he is working on an “alternative history” of the era from World War I to the present entitled The New Spirit of the Laws.
Maier's research and teaching interests have included the history of political economy, collective memory and political justice, states and empires. Maier was a visiting professor at La Sapienza University of Rome in October 2019, a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin during spring 2018, and at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington during the spring of 2011. He has also taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, and was a visitor at the History Department of the Free University of Berlin as a Humboldt Prize Fellow. His most recent book is Once Within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (2016). Other books include Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (2012); Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (2006); Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (1997), The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (1988), In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (1987), and Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975, 1988, and 2015).
“Responding to COVID-19: Think Through the Analogy of War” was co-authored with Ian Kumekawa and is part of a series of white papers written for the bipartisan COVID-19 Response Initiative, spearheaded by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Read more here.
