Ronald G. Asch - Biography#

Ronald G. Asch, born in Hamburg in 1953, is a graduate of Tübingen University where he also completed his doctorate on the counts of Fürstenberg in the 16th and 17th centuries after having studied earlier in Kiel and in Cambridge. He has held a research fellowship at the German Historical Institute London (1985-88) and a lectureship at the University of Münster in Germany (1988-1996). From autumn 1996 to spring 2003 he held the chair of early modern history at the University of Osnabrück and is now teaching at the university of Freiburg as successor to Wolfgang Reinhard. He is the editor or co-editor of Politics, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age (1991); Der Absolutismus - ein Mythos? Strukturwandel monarchischer Herrschaft ca. 1550-1700 (1996), Der Adel im Ancien Régime. Von der Krise der ständischen Monarchien bis zur Revolution (ca. 1600-1789) (2001), and Frieden und Krieg in der Frühen Neuzeit. Die europäische Staatenordnung und die außereuropäische Welt (2001) and the author of Der Hof Karls I. Politik, Provinz und Patronage 1625-1640 (1993), a study of the English court before the Civil War. He has also published a short history of the Thirty Years War in 1997. His work on the European nobility Nobilities in Transition Courtiers and Rebels in Britain and Europe, c. 1550-1700 (London: Edward Arnold 2003) was published in 2003, and he has written a short biography of James VI and I: Jakob I. von England und Schottland: König des Friedens im Zeitalter der Religionskriege (Stuttgart 2005). He also edited together with his former Osnabrück colleague Dagmar Freist a volume on state formation and cultural change in the early modern period (2005). His latest publication is Europäischer Adel in der frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, 2008). Ronald G. Asch is a member of the advisory council of the German Historical Institute London and of the review board for Feodor-Lynen fellowships of the Humboldt foundation. His principal areas of research are British History c. 1558- 1660, the comparative history of the European nobilities and of early modern monarchy as an institution, but he has also worked on German history in the early modern period.