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, underlay 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. 

In 2005, I was president of the Conference Group for Central European History (now the Central European History Society of the American Historical Association) as well as a member of the board of editors of the journal Central European History. I also served as Executive Vice-Chairman of the Corporation of the Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington. I am a fifty-year member of the American Historical Association and a life-member of the German Studies Association. With Thomas A. Brady, Jr., of the University of California at Berkeley, I  co-edited the monograph series, "Studies in Central European Histories," which is published by Brill Academic Publishers in Leiden. In 2011 David Luebke of the University of Oregon succeeded Tom Brady as co-editor of the series. In 2014 Celia Applegate of Vanderbilt University succeeded me.  

     I retired from Georgetown in May 2010 and have resided on the Oregon coast since then. I hold a courtesy appointment in the Department of History at the University of Oregon, where I began my teaching career in 1968. I have sought to remain as active a scholar as my physical and intellectual energies have allowed. In 2014, in connection with the centennial of the First World War, I published a number of articles and presented lectures in Germany and the US.

My principal intellectual projects since retirement have been to complete work I began before I returned to Oregon. In 2021, a revised, German-language edition of my biography of Karl Lamprecht, which Sabine vom Bruch and I translated, appeared with the Franz Steiner Verlag in Stuttgart. My history of Imperial Germany, The German Empire, 1871-1918 will be published in 2024 by the Cambridge University Press.



Biography

Education

Ph.D. Stanford University, l968

M.A. Stanford University, 1965

B.A. Cornell University, 1964

Professional Experience

Professor Emeritus of History, Georgetown University, 2010-

Professor of History, University of Oregon, 2010- (Courtesy Appointment)

Professor of History, BMW Center for German and European Studies (Joint Appointment in the Department of History), Georgetown University, 1993-2010

Research Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, 2008-2009

Research Fellow, National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC

Research Fellow, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, DC, 1996-97

Professor of History, University of Oregon, 1981-94

Visiting Research Fellow, Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Freiburg i. Br., 1991-92

Member, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, Spring Semester 1991

Visiting Research Fellow, Institut für neuere Geschichte, Ludwigs- Maximilians-Universität, Munich, 1984-85  

Visiting Research Fellow, Friedrich-Meinecke Institut, Free University of Berlin, 1976-77

Associate Professor of History, University of Oregon, 1974-81

Assistant Professor of History, University of Oregon, 1968-74

Instructor of History, Stanford University, 1967-68

Honors and Fellowships

Georgetown University, Career Research Achievement Award for 2010

Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Research Fellowship 2008-2009

National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC, John Birkelund Senior Research Fellowship, 2004-2005

National Endowment for the Humanities, Research Fellowship, 2004-2005

Georgetown University Graduate School, Senior Faculty Fellowship, 2000

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Research Fellowship, 1996-97

Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History, American Philosophical Society, 1994

Gerda Henkel Foundation, Research Fellowship, 1991-92, 2008-2009

Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, Research Fellowship, 1984-85, 1987

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Research Fellowship, 1980-81

Fulbright Commission, Research Fellowship, 1976-77

North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Research Fellowship, 1971, 1972

National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship for Younger Humanists, 1970-71

Phi Beta Kappa

Recent Publications 

“Der Erste Weltkrieg als industrieller Volkskrieg,” Jörg Echternkamp and Hans-Hubertus Mack, eds., Geschichte ohne Grenzen? Europäische Dimension der Militärgeschichte vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute. Munich: DeGruyter/Oldenbourg, 2017, 49-55.

"George Washington überquert den Rhein: Zum großen Gemälde Emanuel Leutzes,” Karl Holl and Hans Kloft, eds., Elbe, Rhein und Delaware: Flüsse und Flussübergänge als Orte der Erinnerung. Bremen: editions lumiére, 2017. 121-27.

 “Militarismus und Bellizismus,” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift, 76. Beilage (2017): 110-19.

“Kuhn and Lamprecht,”History of Knowledge, September 14, 2018.

“The History of War and Military Affairs: Discussion Forum. The Vanishing Nineteenth Century in European History?” Central European History51 (2018): 651-55.

Karl Lamprecht: Das Leben eines deutschen Historikers (1856-1915). Translated from the English by Sabine vom Bruch and Roger Chickering. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021.


“Deutschland im Jahre 1917,” Meike G. Werner, ed., Ein Gipfel für Morgen: Kontroversen 1917/18 um die Neuordnung Deutschlands auf Burg Lauenstein. Göttingen: Wallenstein Verlag, 2021. 26-36.


The German Empire, 1871-1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.


Courses Taught at Georgetown

Undergraduate Courses

Graduate Courses

  

Internet Links