Jan De Graaf

Dr. Jan De Graaf is a historian specializing in post-war European social and political movements, affiliated with the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum. He holds a PhD from the University of Portsmouth (2015) and conducted postdoctoral research at the Catholic University of Leuven (2015–2019). His work focuses on wildcat strikes, socialist party dynamics, and Cold War-era labor movements across East and West Europe.

Research interests include the socio-political reconstruction of Europe after 1945, transnational socialist cooperation, and the interplay between labor protests and state policies. He has received grants from the Society for the Study of French History, the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, and the German Mining Museum in Bochum. In 2019, he was awarded the prestigious Sofja Kovalevskaja Prize, enabling him to establish a research group analyzing postwar efforts to build egalitarian societies.

His publications explore topics such as worker protests in coal mining regions, Italian and Polish socialist strategies, and comparative analyses of social democracy models. Key themes include labor militancy, ideological divides between East and West, and the contested meanings of 'free labor' in post-war contexts.