Jacob Eder has served as Rector of the Barenboim-Said Akademie since September 2026, where he has also taught as Professor of Modern and Contemporary History since 2019. His research and teaching focus on memory culture, transatlantic relations, and the history of antisemitism.

Born in Bad Aibling in 1979, Eder studied history and American studies at LMU Munich and the University of Leeds from 2001 to 2005. In 2007, as a Fulbright scholar, he earned a master’s degree at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He then pursued doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania, completing a master’s degree in 2009 and a PhD in history in 2012. During the 2011/12 academic year, he was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where he also coordinated the Program on Conducting Archival Research. After completing his doctorate, he worked as a research associate at the Chair of Modern and Contemporary History at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, where he received the university-wide teaching award in 2018.

Eder has secured numerous fellowships and externally funded research projects, including from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the DAAD, the German Research Foundation (DFG), and the German-American Fulbright Commission. His research has taken him to the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research in Braunschweig, the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., and, on two occasions, the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Between autumn 2017 and February 2019, he was a Feodor Lynen Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in the History Department at New York University, and in 2018 also a Fellow at NYU’s Remarque Institute. In 2017 and 2018, Eder was a visiting scholar at the Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and in summer 2023 a visiting professor at the university’s Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. In summer 2025, he was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University.

Eder writes regularly for leading media outlets. His study Holocaust Angst (Oxford University Press, 2016; German edition: Wallstein, 2020) received wide acclaim and was awarded the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History by the Wiener Library London, the Marko Feingold Prize of the University of Salzburg, and the Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His current book, Jenseits der Staatsräson (Droemer, 2026), examines the debates surrounding memory politics, antisemitism, Israel, and the Middle East conflict. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it, Eder dissects the term and positions himself constructively between all camps.

At the Barenboim-Said Akademie, Eder previously served as Director of Academic Operations, where he played a key role in advancing the Akademie’s academic profile, expanding partnerships with universities at home and abroad, and strengthening ties with funding institutions. Through the “Akademie-Forum” lecture series, launched as part of the Humanities Program, he helped ensure that the Akademie engages with academic and socio-political debates connected to its founding mission.

In addition to numerous essays and articles, Jacob Eder is the author of Holocaust Angst: The Federal Republic of Germany and American Holocaust Memory since the 1970s (Oxford University Press, 2016; paperback edition 2021). The book received wide acclaim and appeared in Polish translation in 2019 (Instytut Pileckiego) and German translation in 2020 (Wallstein). He is co-editor of Holocaust Memory in a Globalizing World (Wallstein, 2017) and writes for, among others, The Atlantic, Haaretz, Spiegel Online, Süddeutsche Zeitung, tageszeitung, Time Magazine, and Zeit Online. His current book, Jenseits der Staatsräson: Erinnerung, Antisemitismus und der Nahostkonflikt in Deutschland, was published by Droemer in 2026.

The project “What is historical responsibility?” is kindly support by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation.