Geoff Eley

This biography of a living person includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. Please help improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (January 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Geoffrey Howard [Geoff] Eley (born 4 May 1949) is a British-born historian of Germany. He studied history at Balliol College, Oxford, and received his PhD from the University of Sussex in 1974. He has taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in the Department of History since 1979 and the Department of German Studies since 1997. He now serves as the Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at Michigan.

Eley's early work focused on the radical nationalism in Imperial Germany and fascism, but has since grown to include theoretical and methodological reflections on historiography and the history of the political left in Europe.

Eley is particularly well known for his early study, The Peculiarities of German History (first published in German as Mythen deutscher Geschichtsschreibung in 1984), co-authored with David Blackbourn (a fellow Briton, who now teaches at Vanderbilt University), which challenged the orthodoxy in German social history known as the Sonderweg thesis. His most successful book is Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000, which has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian, Korean, Turkish and Greek. Recently, he published a collection of essays on fascism called Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 with Routledge Press.