Academic Programs

Faculty

Christopher Browning

Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of History. He received his M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1975) University of Wisconsin-Madison and his B.A. from Oberlin College in 1967. He taught at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, for 25 years before joining the UNC faculty in 1999.

Prof. Browning specializes in the history of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany and regularly offers a course on the History of the Holocaust (HIST 50). He has also offered undergraduate seminars on “Life and Death in the Polish Ghettos” and the historiography of National Socialism. His research has focused on two aspects of the Holocaust: the decision-making process that launched the Final Solution and the motivation of the perpetrators. He has published seven books in the field of Holocaust Studies, including two that have been awarded the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category: Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1993) and The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (2004).

Professor Browning was invited to deliver the George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge University in 1999, published as Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers, and the George L. Mosse Lectures at the University of Wisconsin in 2002, published as Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony. His current research project is to write a history of the Nazi factory slave labor camps for Jewish workers in Starachowice, a small industrial town in central Poland. The primary source for this project is some 250 survivor testimonies that have been given over the past 60, from the summer of 1945 to interviews in 2004.

Jewish Studies Courses Taught:
JWST 50/HIST 050. “History of the Holocaust”