Rebekka Habermas

Rebekka Habermas (3 July 1959 – 21 December 2023) was a German historian and professor of modern history at the University of Göttingen. Habermas made substantial contributions to German social and cultural history of the 19th century. She held visiting positions at universities in Paris, Oxford, Montreal and New York City, among others.

Life and career
Rebekka Habermas was born in Gummersbach, the daughter of philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas. From 1979 to 1985, she studied history and Romantic Literature in Munich, the University of Konstanz, and in Paris, earning a master's degree and completing her Staatsexamen in Konstanz in 1985. She then received training in publishing and worked as an editor at S. Fischer Verlag. After earning her doctorate at Saarland University in 1990 under the auspices of the German National Academic Foundation, Habermas spent the next two years as an associate professor at Saarland University's historical institute. From 1992 to 1997, Habermas conducted research for the University of Bielefeld's special research project Sozialgeschichte des neuzeitlichen Bürgertums (Social History of the Modern Middle Class), which was financed through the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In 1998, Habermas secured her habilitation from the faculty of history and philosophy at the University of Bielefeld. She then worked for two years as an interim full professor at Ruhr University, Bochum. Since 2000, she held a chair in medieval and modern history at the University of Göttingen.

Habermas died on 21 December 2023, at the age of 64.

Work
Habermas' work focused on the history of the bourgeoisie, legal history, administration history, gender history, the history of criminality, and historical anthropology. In her research and books, she was aware of people and the conditions under which they acted. She introduced international research into Germany, for example translating the teaching of Michel Foucault with whom she had studied in Paris.

Habermas held a number of visiting appointments:
 * Guest professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2002)
 * Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at St Antony's College of Oxford University (2010–2014)
 * Visiting fellow at the University of Münster's excellence cluster "Religion und Politik" (2014)
 * Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen's Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities & Social Sciences (2014–2015)
 * Guest professor at the Université de Montréal (spring semester, 2016)
 * Theodor Heuss Professor at The New School in New York (autumn term, 2016)

From 2010, Habermas served as spokesperson for the research training group Dynamiken von Raum und Geschlecht (Dynamics of Space and Gender), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In 2011, she received the Geisteswissenschaften International, a humanities prize awarded by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels to support translation of distinguished academic books. In 2012, she was inducted into the Academia Europaea. Two years later, she received honorable mention in competition for the Chester Penn Higby Prize, an award bestowed biennially by the Journal of Modern History for the best essay published in the organ.

Habermas served as editor of the journal Historische Anthropologie and co-editor of the series Campus Historische Studien. In addition, she was a member of numerous research groups, including Historische Anthropologie, Geschlechterdifferenz in europäischen Rechtskulturen. She was a board member of Göttingen's Zentrum für Theorie und Methodik der Kulturwissenschaften, and a contributor to the conception and planning of Wolfgang Benz's series Europäische Geschichte. She sat on other commissions and juries as well, including the European Research Council's scientific review panel for social sciences and humanities.