Biography Between Structure and Agency

Volker Berghahn is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University where he moved in 1998 from Brown University, after a longer spell of teaching at the University of Warwick in England. The author of more than a dozen books, he has long been interested in the challenges of modern biography. In 1993, he published a study of the industrialist Otto A. Friedrich and his role in the reconstruction of West German industry after 1945. His America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe uses Shepard Stone—renowned journalist, Ford Foundation officer in charge of its European and international programs, and the first director of the Berlin Aspen Institute—as a window to the trans-Atlantic world of American and European intellectuals and scholars, many of whom were associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom during the Cold War.

Simone Lässig has been Director of the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, Germany and Professor of Modern History at the University of Braunschweig since October 2006. From 2002 to 2006 she was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. She has published mainly on modern German and Jewish history. Her last book focused on the question of how nineteenth century German Jews entered the bourgeoisie. She is currently preparing a biographical study on a German-American banking family.