Max Bergholz is a historian of modern Europe who studies the dynamics of intercommunal violence, nationalism and historical memory, primarily in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia. He is currently a Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal, where he has taught since 2011.

Bergholz’s work combines three skills that are rarely present in a single historian: deeply-immersive fieldwork, cutting-edge theoretical engagement, and dramatic – even cinematic – storytelling.  His research has provided path-breaking insights into the violent human past by challenging existing understandings of the causes, trajectories, and memories of violence through the use of microhistorical methods. 

His first book, Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell University Press, 2016), explains how the once peaceful, multiethnic community of Kulen Vakuf – located on the border between present-day Bosnia and Croatia – descended in 1941 into horrific violence, which culminated in a series of massacres of more than 2,000 people. He is currently writing a book entitled Our Truths: Violence and the Challenge of a Common Humanity, which investigates how three distinct governments and their local supporters in the Croatian town of Glina have attempted between 1945 and the present day to grapple with aspects of that town’s violent past during 1941. 

Bergholz’s research and writings have won support from numerous prestigious foundations and councils, such as the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

He has published extensively in major academic journals, including the American Historical Review, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and History & Memory, among others.

Bergholz has received several awards in recognition of his contributions to the advancement of knowledge of the human past. The awards include the 2017 Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association and the 2019 Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies from the Nanovic Institute at the University of Notre Dame. His book, Violence as a Generative Force, won a total of five prizes, its Bosnian/Croatian edition was named a 2019 Book of the Year by the Croatian newspaper Jutarnji list, and was published in a Chinese edition in 2023.