Simone Lässig

Simone Lässig

Simone Lässig,member of the steering committee, has been the director of the German Historical Institute (GHI), Washington DC, since 2015. She is currently on leave from the University of Braunschweig, where she holds a professorship in modern history, and from the directorship of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research. In 2009-2010, she was a visiting professor at St Antony’s College, Oxford. She is co-editor of the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft and founded the Journal for Educational Media, Memory, and Society (JEMMS), which she edited until 2015. Her first book, a study of the campaign for electoral reform in Saxony, won the 1996 Horst Spring Prize for the best book in Saxon history. Her second book, a study of the embourgeoisement of German Jewry, was awarded the German Historical Association’s biennial prize for best second book in history (habilitation) in 2004. Her main fields of research are modern Jewish history, the history of knowledge, educational media, digital history, and biography as a historical genre. Simone Lässig serves on the boards of several organizations and research institutions, and is currently working on two research projects: a study of a German-Jewish family from the early nineteenth century to the present, and a study on religion as an agent of change, preliminarily entitled “Jews, Middle Class Culture, and Social Transformation in Germany, 1800-1860.”