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Overview

Professor Kay Schiller

Professor (Modern European History)


Affiliations
Affiliation
Professor (Modern European History) in the Department of History

Biography

Kay Schiller is a historian of 20th-century Germany. He has published articles and books on German cultural and sports history, including on the history of football, on modern German-Jewish history and on the history of the Federal Republic and the GDR.

He has co-edited volumes on German sport history and the history of the FIFA World Cup, co-authored a monograph on the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, the award-winning The 1972 Munich Olympics and the Making of Modern Germany, and written a monograph on the 1974 FIFA World Cup in West Germany. His most recent book (2022) is a biography of the 1920s Jewish-German sprinter, antifascist activist, emigre to Britain and post-war journalist and writer Alex Natan (1906-71). He is currently researching (with Udi Carmi) the influence of German sports models on sports in Palestine and Israel, with a special focus on the activities of the Zionist sports functionary Emmanuel Ernst Simon (1898-1988).

In 2010-11 he was a Senior Research Fellow at Humboldt University in Berlin and during 2012-13 DAAD Visiting Professor in Contemporary History at Technical University Dresden. In 2018-19 he led the Durham IAS sponsored project 'Masculinities in Martial Sports: West, East and Global South' (https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/201819projects/schiller/). In 2018-19 he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich and Honorary Fellow at Historisches Kolleg Munich. In 2019-20 he was a Research Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

From 2018 to 2023 he was editor-in-chief of Sport in History (Taylor & Francis). He is a member of the editorial boards of Stadion. International Journal of the History of Sport and Sport und Gesellschaft - Sport and Society.

He is also a keen runner and England Athletics qualified running coach and used to officiate amateur football games as a FA qualified referee.

Doctoral Supervision

Kay Schiller welcomes inquiries from potential postgraduate students in modern German history and modern European sport history.

Research interests

  • Sports history, especially the history of football and athletics
  • Post-1945 Germany
  • Modern German cultural and intellectual history
  • German-Jewish history

Publications

Authored book

Chapter in book

Edited book

Journal Article

Other (Print)

Supervision students