Charles S. Maier is the Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. He served as Director of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard from 1994 to 2001 and currently co-directs The Weatherhead Initiative on Global History at Harvard. He serves as an Advisory Chair of the vertices: The Cold War Project and International History and Foreign Policy; and the Global Europe Program at the Council for Global Cooperation.

He taught at Harvard as instructor, assistant professor and lecturer from 1967 to 1975; was a visiting professor of history at the University of Bielefeld in the German Federal Republic in Spring 1976; then served as Associate Professor and Professor of History at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina till 1981; and then he returned to Harvard as Professor of History. At Harvard, he was Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies from 1991-2002 and then as the first Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History until his retirement in June 2019.

Maier held visiting appointments as a director of research at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2007) and as a visiting professor at the LUISS University of Rome (2014) and the Sapienza University of Rome (2019). He was a Distinguished Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (2011) and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1977-78), the German Marshall Fund of the United States (1980-81), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1984-85), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1989-90) and the Alexander von Humboldt research prize fellowship (2002-03). 

He has been awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Cross of Honor for Science and Art (first class) by the Republic of Austria and a doctorate honoris causa in European Studies from the University of Padua. Maier’s publications include several numerous scholarly articles and books, Once within Borders: Territories of Power, Wealth, and Belonging since 1500 (Harvard University Press, 2016); Among Empires: American Ascendancy and its Predecessors (Harvard University Press, 2006); and Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (Harvard University Press, 2014) among others. He graduated from Harvard College with summa cum laude in 1960, studied at St. Antony’s College, Oxford University on a Henry Fellowship during 1960-61 and earned a Ph.D. in History from Harvard University in 1967.