Professor Neil Gregor
Professor of Modern European History
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Neil Gregor is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton.
My research interests range widely across 20th century German history, and have encompassed, at various points, aspects of business history, social history, cultural history and literary studies, along with historiography. At times I have worked firmly within the traditional confines of our own disciplinary approaches; at other times I have pursued interdisciplinary agendas drawing on (for example) anthropology, cultural studies and museum studies. The consistent theme that runs through my work, however, is the exploration of the impact and legacies of war on modern German society.
My first book, Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich (Yale University Press, 1998), examined the ways in which a major German corporation adapted to the demands of the Third Reich and became complicit in its racial crimes as a result; it was shortlisted for the Longman/History Today Book Prize and shared the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History in 1997. My second major monograph, Haunted City: Nuremberg and the Nazi Past (Yale University Press, 2008) marked an attempt to explore the unstable dynamics of post-1945 memory cultures against the background of the social history of the post-war years; it also shared the Fraenkel Prize for Contemporary History for that year.
Whilst working on the post-war years I have maintained an active interest in the study of the Third Reich, editing a collection on the historiography of Nazism, publishing a short study of Hitler's writings, and, most recently, editing a Festschrift for my former doctoral supervisor Jeremy Noakes; I have also co-edited, with my colleagues Mark Roseman (Indiana) and Nils Roemer (Texas) a volume of essays on the comparative study of minorities in German history.
I am Co-Editor of the new Oxford University Press book series Studies in German History, and sit on the Academic Advisory Boards of the German Historical Institute London and the Leo Baeck Institute London. I am currently involved in a major consultancy project at the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds, Germany, in connection with the conservation project at the Zeppelin Tribune, one of the most significant archaeological relics of Nazi Germany.