Award of Siegfried Landshut Prize, 2026
31 August 2026
The Hamburg Institute for Social Research (HIS) has announced that the Siegfried Landshut Prize for 2026 will be awarded to Martin Conway, Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Balliol College.
In making the award, the Institute declared:
“As one of the most innovative historians of the history of Europe in the twentieth century, Conway’s reputation rests above all on two works of considerable importance. The Sorrows of Belgium (2012) is a ground-breaking study of the immediate post-war history of Belgium between 1944 and 1947. The book studies how during and after the German occupation, a new state order emerged out of the conflicts between former elites, the exile government in London, and the resistance movements. Western Europe’s Democratic Age (2020) is a study of European postwar history up to 1968, analysing in an elegant but also unexpected manner the continuities and ruptures which characterised this era. For his learned but always comparatively-oriented analysis of political and social alliances, the breadth of his contributions to diverse fields of study of political, religious and gender history, and his public contributions to scholarship, the Hamburg Institute for Social Research has decided to award him the Siegfried Landshut Prize for 2026.”
The Landshut Prize was established in 2018 to commemorate the intellectual contribution of Siegfried Landshut (1897-1968). Born in Strasbourg in 1897, Siegfried Landshut arrived in Hamburg in 1919, having served in the German army during the First World War. He studied Law and Economics in Freiburg and Frankfurt during the 1920s, notably with Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. In 1933, he left the Third Reich, living in difficult circumstances in exile in Egypt and Palestine. In 1951 he was appointed to a Professorship in Political Science at Hamburg University in 1951. He was a wide-ranging social scientist, known for his critique of established methodologies. His best-known work is The Critique of Sociology: Freedom and Equality as Fundamental Problems of Sociology (1929). He remained throughout his long intellectual career an unconventional figure, who had a formative influence on German political science in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Hamburg Institute for Social Research was established in 1984 as an interdisciplinary institute committed to encouraging dialogue between the humanities and social sciences. For more details, see: www.his-online.de/en.
The Prize will be presented to Professor Conway at a ceremony in Hamburg on 27 October 2026.
