Anthony McElligott is professor of history at the University of Limerick, where he is also the Director of the Centre for Historical Research. He is a founding co-editor of Cultural and Social History: The Journal of the Social History Society. He has published widely on the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, notably Contested City: Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona 1917-1937 (1998), The German Urban Experience 1900-1945, Modernity and Crisis (2001), and with Tim Kirk, 'Working Towards The Führer': Essays in Honour of Sir Ian Kershaw (2003). He is currently completing a major new study of the Weimar republic, Rethinking The Weimar Republic: Authority and Authoritarianism 1916-1936.