Christopher Clark

Biography

Professor Clark is an Australian historian working in England. He is the twenty-second Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. In 2015 he was knighted for his services to Anglo-German relations. Christopher Clark’s research interests are centred on the history of nineteenth-century Germany and continental Europe. His early work focused on the political and cultural history of religion. His first book was a study of the relationship between Christians and the Jewish minority in Prussia between 1728 and 1941; here he explored the ways in which contemporary understandings of Christianity shaped successive mutations of the ‘Jewish Question’. Since then he has published various articles and essays on related subjects – some of which examine the trouble that results when the state authority takes the initiative in religious questions, others that look at the ways in which questions of religious allegiance were implicated in processes of political and cultural change. In 2004 he co-edited, with Wolfram Kaiser of the University of Portsmouth, an edited volume about the ‘culture war’ between Catholic and secular social forces that polarised so many European states in the years 1850-90. He has published a study of Kaiser Wilhelm II (2000) for the Longmans/Pearson series Profiles in Power and completed a general history of Prussia for Penguin (2006). He is currently working on a study of political change across Europe in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions.