The mission of the Pierre du Bois Chair is to bring a major scholarly contribution to the history of Europe's relations with the world through teaching, research and public debate. The Chair also pursues these aims through a series of public lectures that address Europe’s role in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century world, for example through colonialism and migration, as well as the question of how that global role conversely impacted European history itself.
The first holder of the Chair was Professor Michael Goebel, from 2018 to 2021. Since September 2021, he has been the Einstein Professor of Global History at Freie Universität, Berlin. A search for his replacement at the Graduate Institute is under way.
