Biographical Summary

Till Knobloch is a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellow at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In addition, Till is a lecturer at the Chair of Modern History at the University of Potsdam, where he is working on his habilitation project, titled “The End of History” – Imagining the Future after the Cold War, under the supervision of Prof. Dominik Geppert.

Till completed his PhD at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a dissertation on the diplomacy preceding the outbreak of the Second World War, supervised by Prof. Konrad Jarausch and Prof. Sönke Neitzel. He previously was a fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, a guest researcher at the Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, and a visiting student at the University of Cambridge. He studied history and mathematics in Heidelberg, Berlin, and Mainz, and spent time abroad at the University of Connecticut, Université Paris-Sorbonne, and King’s College London.

During his stay in Washington, Till will work on his habilitation project, which explores to what extent the leading actors in Germany, the United States, and Russia genuinely believed in an “end of history” after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The project investigates expectations for the future in the realms of politics, the military, and the economy. By critically examining the “end of history” narrative, it seeks to contribute to a broader understanding of the roles that triumphalism and/or pessimism played in shaping the emerging international order after the Cold War.