Maiken Umbach teaches modern European history at the University of Manchester and has held fellowships and visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge, the Australian National University, Harvard, the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, and University College London. Her principal research interest concerns the changing role and configuration of regional identities and place-based politics in German and European history, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. She has published a number of works in the field, including Federalism and Enlightenment in Germany, 1740-1806 (2000), German Federalism: Past, Present, Future (as editor, 2002) and Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment (2004, co-edited with Bernd Hüppauf). She is also joint editor of the journal German History.