Matthias Middell - Biography#

Matthias Middell, professor of cultural history at Leipzig University, earned his PhD in 1989 with a study on French counter-revolution at the end of the 18th century. His habilitation (2002) dealt with World History writing during the 20th century. For more than 15 years he served as a coordinator to the Consortium for the Erasmus Mundus Masters in Global Studies, consisting of 6 European and 11 non-European universities which became a pillar in the foundational process of the new discipline of Global Studies. He contributed to this new discipline also by supervising more than a hundred PhD-students.

His publications deal with global processes, with the historiography of the global and with the method of cultural transfer studies. He heads the editorial board of Comparativ. Journal of Global History now for more than 30 years and serves as the main editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Global History. Since 2002, he contributed to the growth and attractiveness of the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH) which became in 2010 a foundational member of the global Network of Organizations in Global and World History.

Since 2020 he is the director of the Research Centre Global Dynamics at Leipzig University and serves since 2022 as the University’s vice-president for Campus Development: Cooperation and Internationalisation.

He is a board member of both the International Committee of Historians and the International Commission for Philosophy and the Humanities where he is responsible for the project of a Global History of Humankind.