Philipp Stelzel

Philipp Stelzel studied modern European and German history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Columbia University (MA), and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (PhD). He has taught at Duke University, Boston College, and has been assistant professor of history at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, since 2014.

His research focuses on post-1945 German and German-American intellectual and political history, historiography, and transnational history. His first book, History after Hitler: a Transatlantic Enterprise (Intellectual History of the Modern Age series of University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) analyzes the intellectual exchange between German and American historians of modern Germany from the end of World War II to the 1980s.

His current project, Oppressing the Majority, is a contribution to the history of the global phenomenon of populism. It explores the trajectory of an argument that simultaneously emerged in Western Europe and the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, namely that a number of different actors, including political elites, activists, and the media, oppressed the voices of the “silent majority” of the respective populations. Oppressing the Majority follows the argument’s trajectory in West Germany, Great Britain, and the United States in the subsequent four decades and places it in the political, socio-economic, and cultural context of these countries.

He is a 2018-2019 participant in AGI’s project “A German-American Dialogue of the Next Generation: Global Responsibility, Joint Engagement,” sponsored by the Transatlantik-Programm der Bundesrepublik Deutschland aus Mitteln des European Recovery Program (ERP) des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft und Energie (BMWi).