Dan Diner

Professor of Modern European History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem


Dan Diner received his Ph.D. in International Law at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main in
1973 and was awarded his habilitation in 1980. He has held teaching positions at the following
universities: Odense (1983–85), Essen (1985–99), and Tel Aviv (1988–99), where he headed
the Minerva Institute for German History. From 1999 until 2014, he served as Director of the
Simon-Dubnow-Institut für jüdische Geschichte und Kultur at Universität Leipzig. Since 2001,
he has been a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a full member of the Philo-
logical-Historical Class at the Sächsische Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, where he
heads the project ‘Encyclopedia of Jewish European Cultures’. He has been the principal
investigator of the European Research Council Advanced Grant project ‘Judging Histories’,
based at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem since 2014.

Diner has been a visiting scholar at numerous research centers, among them, the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton (2004–05); the Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University (2008,
2011); the Center for Jewish Studies, Duke University (2011); and the Swedish Collegium for
Advanced Study (2014–15). He has also taught as a visiting scholar at several universities, among
them, the University of Oxford (2003) and the University of Chicago (2014–15).

Diner has received the Ernst-Bloch-Preis der Stadt Ludwigshafen (2006), the Capalbio Award (2007)
and the Leipziger Wissenschaftspreis (2013). Among his publications are the books Cataclysms:
A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge (Madison 2008), Beyond the Conceivable:
Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley 2000), Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse: Über
Geltung und Wirkung des Holocaust (Göttingen 2007), Zeitenschwelle: Gegenwartsfragen an die
Geschichte (Munich 2010) and Rituelle Distanz: Israels deutsche Frage (Munich 2015). His books
have been translated into numerous languages.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2015-16.