Michael H. Kater

Michael H. Kater is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of History and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). Having received his BA(hon) and MA in history at the University of Toronto and his doctorate in history and sociology at Universität Heidelberg, he has taught at York University since 1967. He also was Jason A. Hannah Visiting Professor of the History of Medicine at McMaster University in the 1980s and at the University of Toronto in the 1990s.

Kater is internationally recognized as a leading historian of modern Germany, in particular National Socialism and the Third Reich. He has published ca. two hundred learned articles and nine monographs, the latest of which is Never Sang for Hitler: The Life and Times of Lotte Lehmann, 1888-1976, by Cambridge University Press (2008). Professor Kater’s books have been translated into German, Japanese, Russian, and French and have won international prizes. He is currently writing a history of the town of Weimar from the Enlightenment (1770) to the present. As a semi-professional modern-jazz musician und music historian, Kater co-edited Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, with Albrecht Riethmüller from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2003, which is based on an international conference organized at York University under the auspices of CCGES in 1999. Professor Kater has won several major awards, such as Guggenheim and Canada Council Senior Killam Fellowships. In 1990 he won the prestigious Konrad Adenauer Research Award of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (Bonn).