The European Studies Council Modern Europe Colloquium presents
Udi Greenberg, Professor of History, Dartmouth College:
“Decolonization and the Transformation of the European State.”
Udi Greenberg studies and teaches modern European history. His scholarship and teaching focus especially on the history of ideas, politics, and gender and sexuality. His work has been supported, among others, by the ACLS, Mellon Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the DAAD.
His first book, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2015), traces the intellectual, institutional, and political journey of five influential political theorists from their education in Weimar Germany to their participation in the formation of the Cold War. It argues that both Germany’s postwar democratization, and the German-American alliance, were deeply shaped by these émigrés’ attempts to revive intellectual, religious, and political projects first developed in Weimar Germany. In 2016, it was awarded the Council of European Studies’ Book Prize (for best first book in European studies 2014-2015). It also appeared in German, Korean, and Hebrew translations.
His second book, The End of the Schism: Catholics, Protestants, and the Remaking of Christian Life in Europe, 1880s-1970s (Harvard University Press, 2025) focuses on the intersection of religion, politics, gender, and imperialism. It explores how a series of changes in Catholics and Protestants’ thinking about economics, sexuality, race, and global politics (from the rise of Nazism to the Cold War and decolonization in Asia and Africa) brought about the end of the prolonged religious animosities between the two confessions, and the consequences this had for European governance.
He’s currently working on two projects. The first is a co-authored book with Giuliana Chamedes (UW-Madison), which is tentatively called Decolonization and the Remaking of Europe (under advance contract with Princeton Univesity Press). Through a series of thematic chapters, this book charts how the collapse of Europe’s empires, and the migration that followed, helped altered European approaches to varied issues like policing, welfare, labor, sexuality, envoirnmentalism, and religion. The second explores the recalibration of state authority in the 1960s and 1970s. It explores how European states loosened and retooled their control over public health, sexual conduct, education, and military service.