Ewald Grothe (born 23 February 1961 in Nieheim, Westphalia) is a German historian. Since 2009 he has been an extraordinary professor at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal and since 2011 he has been head of the Archive of Liberalism of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Gummersbach.
Academic career
Ewald Grothe grew up in the small town of Bredenborn in the district of Höxter. After graduating from the Städtisches Gymnasium in Brakel, Grothe studied history, public law, and history of law at the Philipps-Universität Marburg from 1981 and graduated with a master's degree. He received his doctorate there in 1994 under Hellmut Seier on the constitutional history of the Electorate of Hesse. Between 1992 and 1995 he was a fellow of the graduate program "Medieval and Modern Statehood (10th-19th Century)" at the Justus Liebig University Gießen and from 1993 to 1995 he was a research assistant at the "Research Center Georg Büchner – Literature and History of the Vormärz" at the University of Marburg. In 1995 he went to the Bergische Universität Wuppertal as a research assistant to Hartwig Brandt, where he habilitated in 2003 on German constitutional historiography in the 20th century. In 2004 he was appointed as a Privatdozent in Wuppertal, and in 2009 he was appointed as an extraordinary professor. Since 2007 he has also been teaching at the University of Cologne. In 2007/2008 he was an associate lecturer at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Kassel. From 2006 to 2010 he was a supervisor in the doctoral program "Social Interests and Political Will Formation. Constitutional Cultures in Historical Contexts" at the Historical Institute of the FernUniversität in Hagen.
As of April 2011, he has been appointed head of the Archive of Liberalism of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Gummersbach, succeeding Monika Faßbender.
Research activities
Grothe supervised publication projects for the Hessian State Parliament, the Historical Commission for Hesse, the Hessian State Centre for Political Education, the German Library Association, and the Ministry for Intergenerational Affairs, Family, Women, and Integration of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.
Grothe's research areas are the history of the constitution, the history of science, the history of liberalism, and the history of political ideas (conservatism, liberalism).
Awards
In 1995, Grothe won the Wilhelm Liebknecht Prize of the university town of Gießen for his dissertation. From 2000 to 2002 he received a habilitation scholarship from the German Research Foundation and a research grant from the Gerda Henkel Foundation in 2010–11.
Scientific offices and memberships
Grothe is a member of the Association of German Historians and the Georg Büchner Society. Furthermore, he is
since 1997 member of the Scientific Council and since 2017 chairman of the Brothers Grimm Society Kassel, since 2001 scientific member and since 2012 member of the Main Committee of the Historical Commission for Hesse in Marburg, since 2006 member of the Association for Constitutional History, since 2011 founding member of the Interdisciplinary Center for Edition and Document Science at the University of Wuppertal, since 2011 Lecturer of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom at the University of Wuppertal, since 2012 Member of the selection committee for scholarship holders of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom, since 2011 fiduciary and since 2020 member of the board of trustees of the Wolf-Erich-Kellner Memorial Foundation for the presentation of the Wolf-Erich-Kellner-Prize, since 2013 Member of the Editions Advisory Board "Group Minutes" of the Commission for the History of Parliamentarism and Political Parties, since 2013 member of the full board and since 2017 chairman of Division 6 (Archives of parliaments, political parties, foundations, and associations) of the Association of German Archivists, since 2015 Board member of the Dimitris Tsatsos Institute for European Constitutional Studies at the Distance University in Hagen, since 2017 member of the board of trustees of the Institute for History and Biography at the Open University of Hagen, since 2017 member of the Historians' Committee of the Association of German Historians, since 2018 Member of the Advisory Board of the Foundation of the Federal President Theodor-Heuss-Haus in Stuttgart.
Editorial activities
Grothe has been co-publisher of the Yearbook of Liberalism Research since 2012 and the Yearbook of the Brothers Grimm Society since 2000.
