Adam Tooze
Professor of History
Office:   31 Hillhouse Ave, Room 307
Office Hours: Tues 1.15-3.15 pm
Phone:  (203) 432-1378
Email:    adam.tooze@yale.edu

Adam Tooze teaches all areas of modern German History, twentieth century economic history, social theory and the philosophy of history.

He received his first degree in economics from King’s College Cambridge. Between 1989 and 1991 he studied at the Free University Berlin and took his PhD in economic history from the London School of Economics in 1996. For 13 years he taught in the History Faculty of the University of Cambridge, before joining Yale as Professor of Modern German History in the summer of 2009.

Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: the Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (CUP, 2001) explored the connection between the emergence of modern national economic statistics and the crisis of the German state in the first half of the twentieth century. It was awarded the H-Soz-Kult Prize for Modern History and the Leverhulme prize.

Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy appeared with Penguin in 2006. It provides a novel account of the Third Reich viewed from the perspective of the regime’s efforts to harness the German economy for its bid for continental hegemony. It won both the Longman and Wolfson prizes, was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper and H Soz Kult prizes, was an Economist book of the year and has been translated into German, Italian, Portugese and Bulgarian. In Germany it has been adopted by the Bundeszentrale fuer politische Bildung.

Tooze’s current project is a history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s fateful decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917. World fit for Heroes is due to appear with Penguin in 2012. Concurrently he is pursuing a long-term interest in German-Balkan economic relations and a series of trans-Atlantic meetings on the history of production in the twentieth century.

In 2009 Tooze was appointed to the academic panel charged by the Bundesfinanzministerum (Federal Finance Ministry) with writing the Ministry’s history in the period of the Third Reich. He has responsibility for the volume dealing with public debt.

Tooze has supervised graduate dissertations on many areas of modern German history, British history, the history of the 1970s, Balkan history and East European economic history.

Course offerings in recent years include:

Modern Germany 1889-1989 – From Hitler to the End of History; Germany and the Crisis of Interwar Europe – Schmitt, Heidegger and their critics; Reconciling Capitalism and Democracy – a trans-Atlantic history 1896-1999; Democracy and the Problem of Peace-Making, 1917-1919; The End of History – from Kojeve to Fukuyama; The Economic History of the United States; The History of Genocide; After the Boom – Social theory in the wake of the 1960s; The Economic and Social History of the Third Reich

Tooze convenes the Yale colloquium in Modern European History.

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