John W. Boyer is Senior Advisor to the President and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. He served as Dean of the College from 1992 through June 2023. During his tenure as dean, he broadened the College curriculum to include many new core courses and new programs of advanced study, as well as strengthened the College’s admissions program and establishing the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts. Boyer was also deeply involved in the founding of the University of Chicago Center in Paris.
Boyer has served as an editor of the Journal of Modern History since 1980. A specialist in the history of the Habsburg Empire and of Central Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Boyer received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1975 and joined the faculty in the same year. Boyer has written four books on Central European history—Political Radicalism in Late Imperial Vienna: Origins of the Christian Social Movement, 1848-1897; and Culture and Political Crisis in Vienna: Christian Socialism in Power, 1897-1918, both of which were published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also the author of Karl Lueger (1844-1910): Christlichsoziale Politik als Beruf (2010) and, most recently, Austria 1867-1955 (Oxford University Press, 2022). In 2004 Boyer was awarded the Cross of Honor for Science and Art, First Class, by the Republic of Austria. He is a Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna in 2015, in recognition of his scholarly work on the Habsburg Empire.
