Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann is an Associate Professor of Late Modern European History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches at the History Department, and is affiliated with the Institute for European Studies, the Institute for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Institute for International Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory.
Born and raised in East Berlin, Hoffmann received his MA at Johns Hopkins University (1993) and his Dr. phil. at the University of Bielefeld (1999). He has published on topics ranging from post-Enlightenment sociability and social thought to the recent history of human rights. His most recent publications include (as co-editor), Seeking Peace in the Wake of War. Europe 1943-1947 (2016); The Ethics of Seeing. Photography and Twentieth-Century German History (2018); as well as (with Sean Franzel) Sediments of Time. On Possible Histories (2018), a new edition and translation of Reinhart Koselleck’s writings on historical theory. He is currently finishing up an intellectual biography of Koselleck, which will come out with Suhrkamp in February 2023.
For some time, Hoffmann is working on two additional book projects: a history of human rights and the eclipse of internationalism (Geschichte der Menschenrechte. Ein Rückblick, under contract with Suhrkamp, English transl. with Princeton UP) and a history of Berlin’s urban life in the 1940s, as it went from capital of the Nazi Empire to shattered metropolis of the Cold War. Together with Samuel Moyn, he is the founding editor of the Cambridge series Human Rights in History.
Hoffmann has received a number of awards and fellowships for his work. Most recently, he has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin’s Institute for Advanced Studies (2017-2018).