Stefan Berger

Biography

Stefan Berger is a professor of history and the director of the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where he is also executive chair of the Foundation History of the Ruhr. He is also an Honourary Professor at Cardiff University in the U.K.

He was born in the Rhineland in Germany in 1964 and was the first in his family to attend university. Supported by the German National Scholarship Foundation and the Cecil Rhodes Foundation he studied history, political science and literature at the Universities of Cologne and Oxford. He spent 25 years working in the U.K. at universities in South Wales and in Manchester, where he was Professor of Modern German and Comparative European History between 2005 and 2011. Since 2011, he has been working in Bochum.

In the U.K., he was a member of the Labour Party and of the UCU union. In Germany, he is a member of the Social Democratic Party and the IGBCE union, whose archives are housed in the Foundation History of the Ruhr. He is a member of the SPD’s Historical Forum and he has chaired a commission of the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) on Memory Cultures of Social Democracy between 2018 and 2021.