Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA United Kingdom
Martin Ruehl took his BA in History (starred First) from Cambridge and his PhD, also in History, from Princeton University (advisors: Anthony Grafton and Suzanne Marchand), with a dissertation on the idea of the Renaissance in modern German thought. After a Research Fellowship at Queens’ College (1999-2003), he joined Sidney Sussex as College Lecturer and Director of Studies in History. Between 2007 and 2017, he was University Lecturer in the German Department and Director of Studies in MML at Trinity Hall. He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2013-14 and at the Martin Luther University in Halle (2020-21). In 2019, he was awarded a Ford Foundation Scholarship and held a Senior Research Fellowship at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. As Chair of the Management Committee at Cambridge (2016-18), he helped launch the new joint degree in History & Modern Languages.
Dr Ruehl teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of German ideas, with a particular focus on Romanticism, Hegel and Marx, German philhellenism, the Conservative Revolution, and Nazi ideology. At the undergraduate level, he supervises both History and Thought topics in Ge1, Ge2, Ge10 and Ge11. On the MPhil in Literature and Culture, he regularly teaches the Core Course seminars on “Culture and Politics: from Marx to Adorno” and a Module entitled “Enlightenment and its Critics from Kant to Heidegger”. On the MPhil in Film and Screen Studies, he has been responsible for the Core Course seminar on “Film and History”. Dr Ruehl welcomes requests to supervise graduate research in modern German history, philosophy, theory, and film.
In February 2017, he was awarded the Pilkington Prize for Teaching Excellence.
Dr Ruehl specializes in the intellectual history of modern Germany. His research to date has focused on the ideas and ideologies that shaped German society and culture from Bismarck to Hitler, in particular the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and its reception since the 1890s. He has published books and articles on Nietzsche, Burckhardt, Thomas Mann, Ernst Kantorowicz, German historicism and grecophilia. His monograph The Italian Renaissance and the German Historical Imagination, 1860-1930 (Cambridge 2015) was shortlisted for the Gladstone History Book Prize of the Royal Historical Society. The recipient of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, Dr Ruehl is currently writing a book on German debates about free and unfree labour from the Enlightenment to the Third Reich.
Research supervision
Dr Ruehl has supervised PhD dissertations on Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Bachofen's Mutterrecht, the idea of Europe in the Weimar Republic, philosophers under Nazism, representations of slavery in nineteenth-century German literature, historiographical controversies in the early Federal Republic, utopian thinking in the Frankfurt School, the films of Alexander Kluge, dystopian fiction in inter-war Germany, the theory and praxis of anti-fascism in Hamburg’s Sternschanze district, Goethe’s idea of the beautiful soul and eighteenth-century salon culture, the ‘Jewish Question’ in Germany during World War I, Schopenhauer’s Indian sources, and other topics. His current doctoral students work on R.W. Fassbinder’s cinema of provocation, Leopold von Ranke, Wagner’s concept of the ‘total work of art’, the popularization of history in the second half of the nineteenth century, the politics of German historiography from Treitschke to Meinecke, German philhellenism after Nietzsche and Burckhardt, and other topics.
Dr Ruehl welcomes requests to supervise doctoral and MPhil theses on topics in modern German intellectual and cultural history, and more generally in the history of historiography and the history of the humanities.
Key Publications
- Nietzsches Perspektiven des Politischen, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter 2023 (ed. with C. Schubert)
- The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination, 1860-1930, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015
- ‘German Horror Stories: Teutomania and the Ghosts of Tacitus’, Arion 22, 2 (Fall/Winter 2014), pp. 129-189
- ‘Das Allgemeine und sein Bild: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Jacob Burckhardts’, Historische Zeitschrift 296, 1 (2013), pp. 49-83
- Hitler – Films from Germany: History, Cinema and Politics since 1945, London: Palgrave 2012 (ed. with K. Machtans)
- A Poet’s Reich: Politics and Culture in the George Circle, Rochester: Camden House 2011 (ed. with M. Lane)
- Quentin Skinner: Visionen des Politischen, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2009 (ed. with M. Heinz)
- ‘Politeia 1871: Nietzsche contra Wagner on the Greek State’, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies. Supplement, No. 79 (2003), pp. 61-86
- Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politics in Germany in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wilamowitz, London: Institute of Classical Studies 2003 (ed. with I. Gildenhard)
- ‘In This Time Without Emperors: The Politics of Ernst Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite Reconsidered’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 63 (2000), pp. 187-242
Other Publications
- ‘L’invention de la modernité: La Renaissance de Burckhardt reconsidérée’, in: V. Ferrer and J.-L. Fournel (eds), Renaissances. Constructions, usages et migrations d’une catégorie historiographique, Paris: Droz 2024, pp. 87-111
- ‘Jacob Burckhardt’, in: Christian-Muslim Relations, vol. 21 (1800-1914), ed. David Thomas and John A. Chesworth, Boston: Brill 2024
- ‘Nietzsche’s New Order: The Political after the Death of God’, in: M. Ruehl and C. Schubert (eds), Nietzsche’s Perspectives on the Political, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter 2023, pp. 17-33
- ‘A Centaur at the Edge of the Forest: Jacob Burckhardt as Cultural Historian’, in: S. Bauer and S. Ditchfield (eds), A Renaissance Reclaimed: Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy Reconsidered, Proceedings of the British Academy 245, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2022, pp. 46-75
- ‘The Mother of Modernity: Jacob Burckhardt and the Idea of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Germany’, in: E. Podoksik (ed.), Doing Humanities in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Leiden and Boston: Brill 2019, pp. 155-189
- ‘Modern Intellectual History – A Roundtable Discussion’ (with David Armitage and Michele Battini), Ricerche di Storia Politica 3 (2018), pp. 323-334
- ‘Jacob Burckhardt und der Islam’, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte 12, 5 (Spring 2018), pp. 11-22
- ‘Germany: A Winter’s Tale – Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy’, Art & Christianity 80 (Winter 2015), pp. 8-10
- ‘German Horror Stories: Teutomania and the Ghosts of Tacitus’, Arion 22, 2 (Fall/Winter 2014), pp. 129-189
- ‘Aesthetic Fundamentalism in Weimar Poetry: Stefan George and his Circle, 1918-1933’, in: P. Gordon and J.P. McCormick (eds), Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2013, pp. 240-272
- ‘Introduction’, in: K. Machtans and M.A. Ruehl (eds), Hitler – Films from Germany: History, Cinema, and Politics since 1945, London: Palgrave 2012, pp. 1-27
- ‘Introduction’, in: M. Lane and M.A. Ruehl (eds), A Poet’s Reich: Politics and Culture in the George Circle, Rochester: Camden House 2011, pp. 1-23
- ‘“Imperium transcendat hominem”: Reich and Herrschaft in Ernst Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite’, in: M. Lane and M.A. Ruehl (eds), A Poet’s Reich: Politics and Culture in the George Circle, Rochester: Camden House 2011, pp. 204-251
- ‘Nietzsches Götzendämmerung’, Nietzscheforschung: Jahrbuch der Nietzsche-Gesellschaft 16 (2009), pp. 1-13 (with A.U. Sommer)
- ‘Nachwort’, in: M. Heinz and M.A. Ruehl (eds), Quentin Skinner: Visionen des Politischen, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 2009, pp. 253-286 (with M. Heinz)
- ‘A Master from Germany: Thomas Mann, Albrecht Dürer and the Making of a National Icon’, Oxford German Studies 38, 1 (2009), pp. 63-108
- ‘“An Uncanny Re-Awakening”: Nietzsche’s Renascence of the Renaissance out of the Spirit of Jacob Burckhardt’, in: M. Dries (ed.), Nietzsche on Time and History, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter 2008, pp. 227-267
- ‘Kentaurenkämpfe: Jacob Burckhardt und das Allgemeine’, in: M. Hagner and M. Laubichler (eds), Der Hochsitz des Wissens: Das Allgemeine als wissenschaftlicher Wert, Zurich and Munich: Diaphanes Verlag 2006, pp. 23-72
- ‘Blut, bellezza, Bürgertugend: Thomas Manns Fiorenza und der Renaissancekult um 1900’, in: C. Emden and D. Midgley (eds), German Literature, History and the Nation, Oxford: Peter Lang 2004, pp. 189-229
- ‘Death in Florence: Thomas Mann and the Ideologies of Renaissancismus at the Fin de Siècle’, in: S. Marchand and D. Lindenfeld (eds), Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics and Ideas, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 2004, pp. 186-227
- ‘Nietzsche und Basel’, Nietzsche-Studien 30 (2001), pp. 498-508
Other Professional Activities
This is an article I wrote a while ago on Nietzsche for The Independent (never mind the silly URL):
