– historian, specializing in the 19th and 20th centuries in Central and Eastern Europe.
A graduate of the Department of History and German Literature at Humboldt University in Berlin, and of Eastern European Studies at the Free University of Berlin. Scholarship recipient at the Jagiellonian University and the University of Warsaw. Author of a doctoral dissertation on anti-Semitism in Galicia at the end of the 19th century, which he wrote at the Anti-Semitism Research Center at the Technical University of Berlin. His summa cum laude PhD thesis was awarded, among others, the Immanuel Kant Award, the Scientific Award of the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland in Germany and the Geisteswissenschaften International Award. It was published in German by Metropol and in English by Berghahn Books.
Dr. Buchen’s research interests include the history of European empires and their fall, the history of collective violence, the history of settlement and forced migration, mass politics, nationalism and the shistory of minorities. He was a scholarship holder at the Minerva Foundation in Israel and at King’s College in London as part of the CENDARI Fellowship. Postdoc at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, and was the recipient of a Thesaurus Poloniae scholarship at the International Cultural Center in Krakow. Junior professor at the Technical University of Dresden (2017 – 2023), as well as lecturer in European history at the University of Edinburgh (2015-2017), and assistant professor at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) (2013 – 2015) and at the Otto-Wilhelms-Universität in Bamberg (2012 – 2013). From January 2024, he is assistant professor at the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław (the Zofia and Tadeusz Heimrath Associate Professor for the History of Jews in Breslau and Silesia). This position is financed by the University of Wrocław, two German foundations and a private donor.
He is currently working on a long-term project entitled Strategies of Social Advance and Staying on Top: The Jewish Elites of Breslau, 1848-1933.The project explores the rise of the Jewish residents of Breslau to leading positions in the fields of politics, science, business and healthcare from the end of the emancipation process until 1933. The research will focus on decisions regarding formal education, career strategies, the formation of networks through membership in clubs, parties and associations. To this end, a prosopographical, socio-historical approach investigating a larger group of academics is combined with a cultural-historical perspective on selected individual careers over several generations. The project aims to discover which and how Jewish citizens were able to benefit from emancipation and the Prussian education and entitlement system to rise to elite positions; how Jewish norms and traditions of education and welfare could be applied and how they were transformed; and what effects the new economic and political contexts of the Weimar Republic had on scenarios for advancement and staying at the top.
tim.buchen[at]uwr.edu.pl