Matthew Specter

Visting professor in june 2024

The University of Regensburg was delighted to welcome Matthew Specter as a visiting professor. He was in Regensburg for one week from 17 June as part of the Regensburg-Berkeley Visiting Professorship Program, which is supported by the Regensburger Universitätsstiftung.

Matthew Specter, Senior Fellow at the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and Lecturer in History at Santa Clara University, is an intellectual historian of modern Europe in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, tracing the history of international political thought, especially concerning the realist, liberal, and Marxist traditions, transatlantic connections between Europe and the US, and the role of race, gender and empire in international relations theory, the politics of world order, and war and peace in contemporary social though. He also works on contemporary democratic theory, and the resurgence of neofascism and so-called right-wing ‘populism’ in the global North, including the “America First” movement in the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

During his time in Regensburg, he was collaborating with the Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies (DIMAS), the Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America, the Chair for European History, and the Institute of Political Science.

His talk was part of the Colloquium organized by Prof. Liedtke at the Chair of European History. On 18 June he gave a talk titled “Can IR Realism Be Provincialized? Reflections on a German, American, and Western Tradition in the Changing World Order”. Earlier on the same day he gave a talk organized by Prof. Stephan Bierling, Professor of International Transatlantic Relations. Here Matthew Specter discussed "Realism and Idealism in US Foreign Policy". While in Regensburg, he collaborated with Prof. Eva Odzuck, Chair of Political Philosophy and Theory, where he drew on his expertise on Habermas and German intellectual history in the 20^th century in exchanges with students.

He is the author of two monographs: The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought Between Germany and the United States(Stanford UP, 2022) and Habermas: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge UP, 2010). Since 2014, he has served as Associate Editor of the leading international journal in the theory of history, History & Theory. A native of New York City, he was educated at Harvard, Brown (BA magna cum laude) and Duke, earning the Ph.D. in History from Duke in 2006.

His articles and reviews have been published in History & Theory, Modern Intellectual History, Constellations, Central European History, the Journal of Modern History, Analyse und Kritik, Global Studies Quarterly, Dissent and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is also a contributor to five edited volumes: The Oxford Handbook of Carl Schmitt (Oxford UP 2016), The Cambridge Companion to Continental Philosophy (Cambridge UP, 2025), Claves de Política Global (Keys to Global Policy) (Arpes Editores, 2024), Fascism in America: Past and Present (Cambridge UP, 2023), and Handbuch der Kritische Theorie (Metzler, forthcoming 2025).