Professor Peter Hayes is a world-renowned scholar of the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Educated at Bowdoin College, the University of Oxford (Balliol College), and Yale University, Peter Hayes is Professor Emeritus of History and German and Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at Northwestern University. He taught at Northwestern for 36 years, from 1980 to 2016, winning the Weinberg College Distinguished Teaching Award, the Northwestern Alumni Association Excellence in Teaching Award, and the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence, the University’s highest honor for teaching.

Professor Hayes is the author or editor of thirteen books. They include the prizewinners Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (1987, 2001) and Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (1991). From 2006 to 2010, he was the only American member of the Independent Historians Commission on the History of the German Foreign Office in the Third Reich and the Federal Republic. Its report, published as Das Amt und die Vergangenheit, became a bestseller in Germany. Since then, his work on the Holocaust has resulted in four books: The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (co-edited with John K. Roth, 2010), a wide-ranging anthology entitled How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader (2015), a compact analytical overview called Why? Explaining the Holocaust (2017, with subsequent translations into Chinese, German, Polish, and Spanish), and a collection of essays and documents under the title German Railroads, Jewish Souls (with Christopher Browning and the late Raul Hilberg, 2019). He is currently completing (with Stephan Lindner of Munich) Profits and Persecution: German Big Business, the Nazi Economy, and the Holocaust, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press and Beck Verlag.

Professor Hayes has been the recipient of numerous research fellowships, awards, and accolades, including the 2018 National Leadership Award from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the 2016 Distinguished Achievement Award in Holocaust Studies from the Holocaust Educational Foundation. He has served on the academic boards of multiple professional societies and Holocaust memorial sites, including as Chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from May 2014 to May 2019.

Read Professor Hayes' Shapiro lecture summary here.