Prof. Dr. Jacob Eder
History, Director of Academic Operations
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biography

Jacob Eder teaches Modern and Contemporary History at the Barenboim-Said Akademie. His research as a historian deals with the politics of memory, antisemitism, transatlantic relations, humanitarianism, and migration. 

Before joining the Barenboim-Said Akademie, Jacob Eder taught contemporary history at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena and was, from 2017 to 2019, a Feodor Lynen-Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the History Department of New York University as well as a Fellow at NYU’s Remarque Institute for the multi-disciplinary and comparative study of Europe and its near neighbors. From 2001 to 2005, he studied Modern History and American Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and the University of Leeds (UK). In 2007, he received an M.A. in History from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he held a Fulbright Scholarship. He received an M.A. as well as a Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009 and 2012, respectively. Eder has held fellowships at the Georg-Eckert-Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and twice at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2011-12, he was the Mellon Foundation Fellow at the IERES/Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where he also coordinated the Program on Conducting Archival Research. In 2017 and 2018, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Jacob Eder has received fellowships and grants from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ernst-Abbe-Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the German Research Foundation (DFG), the German-American Fulbright Commission, the Jena Center 20th Century History, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the University of Pennsylvania, the Zeit-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, and others. His book “Holocaust Angst" was a finalist for several awards and received the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History of the Wiener Library, the Marko Feingold Prize (Salzburg), and the Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. In 2018, Eder received Jena University’s teaching award for a seminar on memory in Germany and Israel, which brought together students from Jena and Jerusalem.

Publications

In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, Jacob Eder is the author of Holocaust Angst: The Federal Republic of Germany and American Holocaust Memory since the 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2016; paperback 2021). This book has been widely reviewed and was translated into Polish (Instytut Pileckiego, 2019) and German (Wallstein, 2020). Eder is also a co-editor of Holocaust Memory in a Globalizing World (Wallstein, 2017) and has written for The Atlantic, Haaretz, Süddeutsche Zeitung, tageszeitung, Time Magazine, and Zeit Online.

Contact: Jacob.Eder@barenboimsaid.de