Sebastian Conrad

Sebastian Conrad in 2025Sebastian Conrad (born 19 March 1966 in Heidelberg ) is a German historian and professor of modern history at the Free University of Berlin, specializing in global and colonial history.

Academic career Conrad studied history, Japanese studies, and economics at the University of Bonn, Osaka University of Foreign Studies, and the Free University of Berlin. After a research stay at the University of Tokyo, he received his doctorate from the Free University of Berlin in 1999 with a comparative study on historiography in Japan and West Germany after the Second World War. His dissertation was awarded the Ernst Reuter Prize, and in the same year he was admitted to the Junge Akademie. He returned to the Free University of Berlin in 2010 as professor of modern history.

Since 2012, he has directed the master's program "Global History", offered jointly by the Free University of Berlin and Humboldt University of Berlin. Conrad has held visiting positions at institutions including the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, the University of California, Santa Barbara, The New School in New York, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and the University of Tokyo. and to the Academia Europaea. Pankaj Mishra wrote in BBC History Magazine that he “can’t think of a more useful guide” to the field. In a review for sehepunkte, Cyrus Schayegh described the book as “the new gold standard of its field,” calling it “sharp but balanced, comprehensive yet to the point.” Christopher Goscha referred to it as “a gem of a book,” noting that it explains global history “brilliantly” without losing readers in theoretical jargon. The book has been translated into fourteen languages.

Selected works Monographs Die Königin. Nofretetes globale Karriere (English title: The Queen: Nefertiti’s Global Career). Berlin: Propyläen, 2024. . What Is Global History?. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. . German Colonialism: A Short History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. . Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. . The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. . Verso il mondo moderno: Una storia culturale. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 2022. .

Edited volumes (with Jürgen Osterhammel) Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt 1871–1914 Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. . (with Akira Iriye and Jürgen Osterhammel) An Emerging Modern World, 1750–1870. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. . (with Aleida Assmann) Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. . (with Dominic Sachsenmaier) Competing Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. .

Book chapters “A Cultural History of Global Transformation” In An Emerging Modern World, 1750–1870, edited by Sebastian Conrad, Jürgen Osterhammel and Akira Iriye, 433–708. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.