James Retallack
James Retallack (born July 2, 1955 in Montreal) is a Canadian-American historian.
Biography
Retallack studied history at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, until 1978, and then as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1983. He subsequently received postdoctoral fellowships at Stanford University and the University of Alberta. In 1987, he was appointed to the University of Toronto, where he remains a professor of history.
Retallack's research and teaching activities cover German and European history between 1740 and 1945. In 1993/94, he spent a year as a Humboldt Fellow at the Free University of Berlin and was a visiting professor at the Institute of Political Science there. In 2002/03, he was a visiting professor at the Georg August University in Göttingen and won the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award. He has also taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2011, he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2014, he taught as a visiting professor at the University of Wuppertal.
Retallack's work has been assisted by research grants, fellowships, and prizes from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Killam Program at the Canada Council for the Arts, the Connaught Program and the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Works
- Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany. New Perspectives (1992; with Larry Eugene Jones)
- Between Reform, Reaction and Resistance. Studies in the History of German Conservatism from 1789 to 1945 (1993; with Larry Eugene Jones)
- Modernisierung und Region im wilhelminischen Deutschland. Wahlen, Wahlrecht und politische Kultur (1995; with Karl Heinrich Pohl & Simone Lässig)
- Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II (1996)
- Sachsen in Deutschland. Politik, Kultur und Gesellschaft 1830–1918 (2000)
- Wilhelminism and its Legacies. German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890–1930. Essays for Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (2003; as editor; with Geoff Eley & Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann)
- The German Right, 1860–1920. Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (2006)
- Imperial Germany, 1871–1918 (2008; as editor)
- Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place. German-speaking Central Europe, 1860–1930 (2014; as editor; with David Blackbourn)
- Germany’s Second Reich. Portraits and Pathways (2015)
- Decades of Reconstruction. Postwar Societies, State-Building, and International Relations. From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century (2017; as editor; with Ute Planert)
- Red Saxony. Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860–1918 (2017)
Collaborations
- "The 'Non-Voter': Rethinking the Category," co-authored with Marc-André Dufour, in Parlamentarismuskritik und Antiparlamentarismus in Europa, edited by Marie-Luise Recker and Andreas Schulz (Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2018), 235–52.
- "After the 'German Civil War' of 1866: Building the State, Embracing the Nation," in Decades of Reconstruction: Postwar Societies, State-Building, and International Relations from the Seven Years’ War to the Cold War, edited by Ute Planert and James Retallack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 198–215.
Selected publications
- "August Bebel: A Life for Social Justice and Democratic Reform," Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 58 (2018): 145–61.
- "Mapping the Red Threat: The Politics of Exclusion in Leipzig before 1914," Central European History 49 (3/4) (December 2016): 341–82.
