Dr. Stephen Milder

Stephen Milder is writing a history of the emergence of climate politics in the 1980s and 1990s with funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG–Eigene Stelle, 2020–24). He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012, where he wrote a dissertation on grassroots anti-nuclear activism in Baden and Alsace. He then served as a visiting assistant professor of history at Duke University and was a Mellon Foundation post-doctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis before becoming an assistant professor of Politics and Society at the University of Groningen in 2015. His monograph Greening Democracy: The Anti-Nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968–1983 was published in 2017. He has also published articles and book chapters on green politics, the transnational career of Petra Kelly, and the history of democratic praxis, among other topics.

RCC Research Project

Making Green Germany: The Emergence of Climate Politics Amidst German Reunification and the Post-Cold War Transformation of Europe (PDF, 61 KB)

Selected Publications

• with Andreas Jünger, Katharina Scharf, Amanda M. Nichols, Friedericke Bruehoefener, and Adam Stone. “Petra Kelly: Life and Legacy of a Transnational Green Activist.” Environment & Society Portal, Virtual Exhibitions 2024, no. 1. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/9772.
• “From Tinkerers to Consultants: Individual Engagement, Reunification, and the Making of Germany's Renewable Energy Sector.” Global Environment 17, no. 1 (February 2024): 15–46. doi.org/10.3828/whpge.63837646622481.
• “The Alarming Stakes of German Rearmament.” Boston Review, 11 January 2023. www.bostonreview.net/articles/ukraine-and-the-eclipse-of-pacifism/.
• with Stefan Couperus. “From ‘Grey Democracy’ to the ‘Green New Deal’: Post-War Democracy and the Hegemonic Imaginary of Material Politics in Western Europe.” Journal of Modern European History 20, no. 3 (July 2022): 288–93. doi.org/10.1177/16118944221113288.
• edited with Belinda Davis and Friederike Brühöfener. Rethinking Social Movements after '68: Selves and Solidarities in West Germany and Beyond. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. www.berghahnbooks.com/title/DavisRethinking.
• Greening Democracy: The Anti-Nuclear Movement and Political Environmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968–1983. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. doi.org/10.1017/9781316471401. Also featured in H-Environment Roundtable Reviews 10, no. 9 (2020). networks.h-net.org/system/files/contributed-files/env-roundtable-10-9.pdf.