Roger Chickering

I was a member of the School of Foreign Service and the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown from 1993 to 2010. I was Professor of History in the BMW Center for German and European Studies. My fields of specialization were modern German and European history.  My principal research interests lay in the German Empire and the First World War. My interests grew out of work I that I did on the historian Karl Lamprecht, who aspired to write "total history," and collaborative work that I undertook with Stig Förster of the University of Berne on the history of "total war."  The effort to bring these two concepts together, to write the total history of a total war, resulted in the book that I published on the First World War in the southwestern German city of Freiburg i. Br.  The book was published in English by the Cambridge University Press in 2007 and in German by the Schöningh Verlag in 2009. 

Since my retirement, I have remained as active as my retreating energies have allowed. The centenary of the outbreak of World War I in 2014 put me in some demand for lectures and articles. In 2021 my biography of Lamprecht appeared in a revised German edition with the Franz Steiner Verlag. And in 2025, I finally published a long-term writing project, a history of the German Empire.

In 2023 I and my wife, Alison Baker, along with Tom and Kathy Brady, formally endowed a chair in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon. The chair, which commemorates our decades of friendship and collaboration in Eugene and beyond, is to support a scholar of Central European Histories--the field in which Tom and I taught together and for many years edited a monograph series for Brill.