Hans-Christof Kraus

Kraus' work and research focuses on German and English history of the 18th to 20th century, the history of politics, Constitutional History, political History of Ideas, as well as the history of education and science. For his research Kraus has been awarded numerous scientific honours and memberships. Kraus is a member of several historical commissions, such as the Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften [de], the Kommission für Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien [de], the Historische Kommission zu Berlin [de] and the Vereinigung für Verfassungsgeschichte [de]. He is a member of the board of the Preußische Historische Kommission [de]. Kraus is also editor of the Neue Deutsche Biographie and co-editor of various historical journals, including the Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte [de], the Jahrbuch Politisches Denken and the Passauer Jahrbuch [de]. In 2006 he was awarded the Historian Prize of the Erich and Erna Kronauer Foundation [de].

In 1992 he submitted his dissertation on the Prussian conservative Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach in the subject of modern history to Rudolf von Thadden. In 1994/1995 Kraus was a scholarship holder at the Historisches Kolleg [de] in Munich. In 2002 after his habilitation, he studied at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München with the topic English constitution and political thought in the Ancien Régime 1689-1789. The work was reviewed by Horst Möller, Eckhart Hellmuth and Hans-Michael Körner. After teaching activities at the University of Administrative Sciences, Speyer [de] and at the University of Stuttgart, the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich and the University of Jena, he was appointed to the chair of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Passau in 2007.

Born in Göttingen, Kraus studied history, German literature and philosophy at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen from 1978 to 1984. In the 1980s he was editor of the Young Conservatives Phoenix magazine. In the late 1980s and 1990s he wrote articles for right-wing conservatism journals Etappe and Criticón [de], as the student assistant at the Institute of History at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Niklas Weber, wrote in an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, which was criticized by Benjamin Hasselhorn as "one-sided and distorting."

Hans-Christof Kraus (born 3 November 1958) is a German historian.