Michael Burleigh

Professor Michael Burleigh (born 3 April 1955) is a British historian, author, and commentator. He has written extensively on international relations, populism, terrorism, and modern European history. He was the first Engelsberg Chair of History and International Relations at the London School of Economics IDEAS centre (2019–2020) and remains a Senior Fellow there, working on a project about world orders.

Career

Burleigh was educated at University of London, where at UCL he was awarded a First Class Honours in History in 1977 and Bedford College, where he received a PhD in history in 1982. He has held academic posts at New College, Oxford, the London School of Economics, and Cardiff University, where he was Distinguished Research Professor in Modern History. He has also taught in the United States at Washington and Lee University in Virginia and as Kratter Visiting Professor at Stanford University. At LSE IDEAS, Burleigh has contributed to research on foreign policy and international security. He was appointed the inaugural Engelsberg Chair of History and International Relations in 2019, an annual visiting professorship which includes public lectures for the school’s foreign policy think tank.

Publications

Burleigh is the author of a number of books translated into twenty languages. His The Third Reich: A New History (2000) won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction in 2001. Small Wars, Far Away Places: The Genesis of the Modern World 1945–65 (2013) was longlisted for the same prize in 2014. His later works include The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: A History of Now (2017), which examined the stability of the post-Second World War liberal order, Populism: Before and After the Pandemic (2021), and Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Murder (2021).

Commentary and analysis

Burleigh has written widely on contemporary politics and populism. In a 2021 Project Syndicate article, “A Dangerous New Variant of Populism,” he argued that opposition to climate policies and resistance to COVID-19 vaccination could merge into new forms of populist politics with significant implications for European and American democracies.

Media and journalism

Burleigh has presented and contributed to television documentaries, including Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich (1991), which won a British Film Institute Award for Archival Achievement, and Heil Herbie: The Story of the Volkswagen Beetle (1993), which won a New York Film and Television Festival Bronze Medal and presented Dark Enlightenment on More4.

He has written regularly for British newspapers including The Times, The i, the Daily Telegraph, the Evening Standard, the Daily Mail, and the Mail on Sunday. He was also a contributor to Standpoint magazine until its closure in 2021 and then Perspective magazine until its closure in 2024. He also had a foreign policy column on Unherd.

Recognition

Burleigh is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and served on the Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich until 2018. He was the founding editor of the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and has served on the editorial boards of Totalitarismus und Demokratie and Ethnic and Racial Studies. He is a Contributing Editor at Literary Review.  He served on the government’s Advisory Committee for the Centenary Commemoration of World War One from 2012-18. In 2012 he founded Sea Change Partners, a geopolitical risk consultancy. 

Selected works

• Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich. London: Domino Films
• Prussian Society and the German Order. Cambridge University Press, 1984
• Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich. Cambridge University Press, 1988
• The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 – with Wolfgang Wippermann. Cambridge University Press, 1991
• Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 1900–1945. Cambridge University Press, 1994
• Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide. Cambridge University Press, 1997
• Confronting the Nazi Past. St Martin's Press, 1995
• The Third Reich: A New History. Macmillan, 2000
• Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War. HarperCollins, 2005 ISBN 0-00-719572-9
• Sacred Causes: Religion and Politics from the European Dictators to Al Qaeda. HarperCollins, 2006 ISBN 978-0-00-719574-9
• Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism. Harper Collins, 2008
• Moral Combat: A History of World War II. Harper, 2010 ISBN 978-0-00-719576-3
• Small Wars, Far Away Places: The Genesis of the Modern World 1945–65. Viking Press, 2013^[1]
• Day of the Assassins: A History of Political Assassination. Picador, 2021. ISBN 978-1-52-903013-6 ISBN 978-1-76-098619-3 ISBN 978-1-52-903015-0 ISBN 978-1-52-903014-3