Campus
- Downtown Toronto (St. George)
Fields of Study
- Europe
Areas of Interest
His research interests (1830-1918) include German regional history, nationalism, antisemitism, elections, and historiography. He is currently writing a biography of the German Social Democratic leader August Bebel.
Biography
Professor Retallack teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in German and European History, 1740-1945.
He recently published a revised and expanded 2nd edition of Vol. 4 in the online German History in Documents and Images project for the German Historical Institute, Washington DC, covering Bismarckian Germany (1866-1890).
Professor Retallack has held grants, fellowships, and research prizes from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the SSHRC of Canada, the Jackman Humanities Institute, the Killam Program at the Canada Council for the Arts, and the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2011.
He has held Visiting Professorships at the Free University Berlin (1993-4) and the University of Göttingen (2002-3) and he was Visiting Scholar at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal (2014).
He is General Editor of “Oxford Studies in Modern European History” for Oxford University Press and of "German and European Studies" for the University of Toronto Press.
His book Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860-1918 appeared with Oxford University Press in 2017.
Education
Publications
- Das rote Sachsen: Wahlen, Wahlrecht und politische Kultur im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Leipziger Universitätsverlag : 2023)
- German Social Democracy through British Eyes: A Documentary History, 1870–1914 (University of Toronto Press : 2022)
- Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860-1918 (Oxford University Press : 2017)
- Decades of Reconstruction: Postwar Societies, State-Building, and International Relations from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War ( Cambridge University Press : 2017)
- Germany's Second Reich: Portraits and Pathways (University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division : 2015)
- Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II (Chinese Edition) (Peking University Press : 2013)
- Imperial Germany 1871-1918 (Oxford University Press : 2008)
- Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860-1930 (University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division : 2007)
- The German Right, 1860-1920: Political Limits of the Authoritarian Imagination (University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division : 2006)
- Wilhelminism and Its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890-1930 (Berghahn Books : 2004)
- Saxony in German History: Culture, Society, and Politics, 1830-1933 (University of Michigan Press : 2000)
- Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II (Palgrave Macmillan : 1996)
- Modernisierung und Region (Verlag für Regionalgeschichte : 1995)
- Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany (Cambridge University Press : 1992)
- Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876-1918 (Unwin Hyman : 1989)