Norbert Finzsch

Norbert Finzsch (born 1951 in Cologne, Germany) as Norbert Rollewitz is a German historian.

Norbert Finzsch studied German literature and United States history at the University of Cologne, where he passed the state exam in both majors in 1977.

In 1980 he received his PhD in history at Cologne.

The title of the dissertation was The Gold miners of California: Conditions of Work, Standards of Living, and Political System in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century.

It was a cliometric study.

From 1981 to 1988 Finzsch taught American History as an assistant professor at the University of Cologne.

In 1983/1984 he was a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies at the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1988 Finzsch passed his Habilitation (qualification for a professorship) and award of the Venia Legendi (right to teach) with a study of the social history of the Rhineland during the late 18th and early 19th century.

In 1990 Finzsch was appointed deputy director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. In 1992 he received the chair of Modern History at the University of Hamburg as the successor of Günter Moltmann.

At the end of the 1990s, Finzsch broadened his interests by researching the history of genocides and female genital mutilation in Western Europe between 1600 and 1950.

Monographs

Edited Books

Between 1996 and 2000 Finzsch received several fellowships at the University of California in Berkeley, both at the Center for German and European Studies and the Center for International Government Studies.

2000/2001 he served as a visiting professor at the Université Michel Montaigne at Bordeaux, 2003 as visiting scholar at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.

He went to the University of Cologne in 2001 as Professor for North-American History.

His research interests encompass the social history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of gender and sexuality and, since 2001, Australian history.

From 2005 to 2007 Finzsch served as vice president of the University of Cologne.

2012/13 Finzsch was appointed distinguished visiting scholar at Berkeley.

2014/2015 he was received a fellowship at the International Research Center re:work at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

In 2016 Finzsch retired.

In 2017, he received the Meyer-Struckmann-Prize of the Heinrich-Heine-University in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Currently he is teaching at the Sigmund Freud University in Berlin as a visiting professor.

Finzsch began his career as a quantifying social historian of the US and Germany.

Influenced by the linguistic turn and post-structuralist theory, he became a cultural historian, focusing on African American history, the history of penitentiaries and the history of sexualities.