Princeton University

Yair Mintzker is an assistant professor of history, specializing in German-speaking Central Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Born and raised in Jerusalem, Professor Mintzker received his M.A. in history cum laude magna from Tel-Aviv University (2003) and his Ph.D. from Stanford University (2009). His broad interests include urban history as well as intellectual, cultural, and political history of Early Modern and Modern Europe.

Prof. Mintzker’s dissertation, The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 (winner of the Rosenfield’s prize for outstanding dissertation writing), tells the story of the metamorphosis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German cities from walled to defortified places. By using a wealth of original sources, the dissertation discusses one of the most significant moments in the emergence of the modern city: the dramatic—and often traumatic—demolition of the city’s centuries-old physical boundaries and the creation of the open city. The research and writing of the dissertation were supported by grants from the School of Sciences and Humanities at Stanford, the DAAD, the Ms. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the Geballe Dissertation Prize at the Stanford Humanities Center.

In the coming years, Prof. Mintzker plans to turn his dissertation into a book while also beginning to work on a book on one of the most notorious events in eighteenth-century Germany: the trial and execution of Joseph Süss Oppenheimer (“Jud Süss”), in 1730s Stuttgart.

1. The Defortification of the German City, 1689-1866 (Ph.D. Diss., Stanford University, 2009).

2. “What is Defortification? Military Functions, Police Roles, and Symbolism in the Demolition of German City Walls in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” WeimarPolis: Multi-disciplinary Journal for Urban Theory and Practice 1 (2009).

3. “Between the Linguistic and the Spatial Turns: A Reconsideration of the Concept of Space and its Role in the Early Modern Period,” Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques (2009).

4. “‘A Word Newly Introduced into Language’: The Appearance and Spread of “Social” in French Enlightened Thought, 1745-1765.” History of European Ideas 34 (2008), pp. 500-514.