With the beginning of the New Year, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies is pleased to announce a transition in directorship. After serving as interim Director for the 2006 Fall semester, Charles Maier will step down and David Blackbourn will become the fourth Director of CES.

Professor Blackbourn is the Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University, and has been an integral member of the CES faculty since 1992. He is the author of many critically acclaimed works of scholarship, including Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany and most recently, Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany. He has previously served as interim Director of CES in 2003, as well as chair of the Harvard History Department from 1998 to 2002.

This is a challenging period for a Center devoted to the study of Europe -- many scholarly problems transcend European boundaries -- but given the University's emphasis on internationalization it is also a time of great opportunity. Under Professor Blackbourn's leadership, CES looks forward to continuing its long-term initiatives and new projects as well as maintaining its ongoing mission of nurturing first-class individual research and teaching, and bringing an analytic perspective to the crucial issues facing Europe today – qualities that have distinguished the Center from its founding in 1969 by Stanley Hoffmann.