Jürgen Kocka

Guest of the Principal, SCAS.
Professor Emeritus of History, Freie Universität Berlin

Jürgen Kocka taught Social History at the Universität Bielefeld (1973–1988) and History
of the Industrial World at the Freie Universität Berlin (1988–2009). He was a Permanent
Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, President of the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin
für Sozialforschung and Vice-President of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissen-
schaften. He is a Permanent Fellow of the centre ‘Work and Human Life Cycle in Global
History’ at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a Senior Fellow of the Zentrum für Zeit-
historische Forschung, Potsdam. He has held visiting posts at various institutions, among
them the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the
New School for Social Research, New York; Central European University, Budapest; the
École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced
Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Wassenaar; and the University of California,
Los Angeles.

He has published widely in the field of modern history, particularly the social, economic and
cultural history of Germany and Europe as well as the comparative history of the 18th–20th
centuries. His publications in English include Facing Total War: German Society, 1914–1918
(1984); Industrial Culture and Bourgeois Society: Business, Labor, and Bureaucracy in Modern
Germany
(1999); Civil Society and Dictatorship in Modern German History (2010); and
Capitalism: A Short History
(2016).

He has received honorary degrees from several European universities (including Uppsala University)
and a number of prizes, among them the Holberg Prize. He is a member of several academies, for
instance the Academia Europaea, Leopoldina – Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften, the American
Academy of Arts & Sciences, and the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and Arts. He
is also an Honorary Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford.

At SCAS, he will continue his work on the global history of capitalism.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2017-18.