Dr Tobias Hof, private lecturer (Dozent) in Modern and Contemporary History at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, has recently become the Hannah Arendt Visiting Professor for German and European Studies at the Munk School for Global Affairs and Public Policy, and takes on the associated teaching assignment at the University of Toronto from the winter semester 2022/23. 

‘The connections with our academic colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic have been a constituent part of the academic exchange culture at the DAAD for many decades. Dr Tobias Hof, who has agreed to accept the Visiting Professorship, is an expert in contemporary European history and an accomplished connoisseur of American-German academic relations. He particularly chose Hannah Arendt, the outstanding German-American theorist and publicist who had to flee Germany on account of her Jewish faith. We look forward to Dr Hof motivation, and to his lectures in Toronto’, said DAAD President Professor Joybrato Mukherjee. The role of Visiting Professor was jointly created by the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst – DAAD) and the University of Toronto. Experts have been invited to spend a year visiting Canada as guest professors since 1980.

Tobias Hof is a private lecturer (Dozent) in Modern and Contemporary History at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His previous assignments have included being the DAAD Visiting Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Post-Doctoral Fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation at Washington University in St. Louis, and research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, Munich-Berlin and at the Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento.

Hannah Arendt Visiting Professorship

Since 1980 and jointly with the University of Toronto, the DAAD has used funding from the Federal Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt – AA) to finance this Visiting Professorship at the Munk Centre of Global Affairs and Public Policy. The professorship is closely linked with the DAAD-funded ‘Joint Initiative’ that promotes interdisciplinary research in German and European Studies in North America. This involves the appointment of alternating Visiting Professors who are experts in politics, history or sociology. 
Alongside nineteen further ‘German Studies Professorships’ across North America, this Visiting Professorship is part of the DAAD’s North America Strategy: its objective is to promote German and European issues as well as theoretical and methodical approaches that are related to Germany as part of the education programme of leading higher education institutions in North America.

Since the Visiting Professor role was established, it has been performed by 40 lecturers (Dozent), including Carl-Christoph Schweitzer, Wolfgang Knöbl, Markus Kaim, Thomas Großbölting, and latterly by Dagmar Ellerbrock, Claudia Diehl and Klaus Brummer.