Dr Oliver F. R. Haardt

I am a historian of modern Germany and Europe, who is particularly interested in how constitutional and political developments related to the intellectual debates surrounding them. I look at the history of the state from three major perspectives: law, power, and identity. Currently, I am working on the completion of a federal history of Imperial Germany between 1871 and 1918. The book examines how Imperial Germany turned from a loose confederation of sovereign states into a powerful centralised regime, arguing that this structural transformation was driven by an underlying conflict between monarchical and parliamentary power.

Since 2017, I am a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College Cambridge. Before that, I undertook my graduate studies under the supervision of Sir Christopher Clark at Trinity College Cambridge, where I was a Gates Scholar and a fellow of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes. I was also a fellow of the International Max Planck Research School for Comparative Legal History (2011-12) and of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2010-2011). In 2016, my doctoral dissertation on the federal evolution of Imperial Germany won the Helmut-Coing-Prize of the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History.