Research Interests
- The History of Stalinism and the Soviet Union
- World War II and its Legacies in Europe and Asia
- Legal History and International Law
- Empire, Space and Migration
Dr Franziska Exeler
Dr Franziska Exeler is a Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College and Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics.
A historian of Russia, Eastern Europe and Eurasia, my research interests include the political, social and cultural history of Stalinism and the Soviet Union; World War II and its legacies in Europe and Asia; legal history and international law; and empire, space and migration.
Dr Exeler is currently completing a book manuscript titled "Wartime Ghosts. Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in the Soviet Union.” It is based on her PhD dissertation and draws on fieldwork conducted in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Poland, Germany and the United States. The book investigates the choices that inhabitants of the Soviet European borderlands made and were forced to make under German wartime rule, and examines their political, social, personal and legal repercussions.
Related research projects analyze how the Soviet government both understood and experimented with international and domestic law during and after the Second World War, and how the Soviet prosecution of treason and war crimes fit into the global moment of post-World War II justice.
Dr Exeler's research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Research Fellowship, with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the European University Institute (Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship) and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (Postdoctoral Fellowship at the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences).
Qualifications
- PhD in History from Princeton University
- MA in History from Princeton University
- MA in History, Political Sciences and Economics from Humboldt University Berlin
Key Publications
"What Did You Do during the War? Personal Responses to the Aftermath of Nazi Occupation." Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 17, 4 (2016), 805-835.
"The Ambivalent State. Determining Guilt in the Post-World War II Soviet Union." Slavic Review 75, 3 (2016), 606-629.
“Gewalt im Militär. Die Rote Armee im Zweiten Weltkrieg” [Violence within the Military. The Red Army in World War II]. Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 3 (2012), 228-246.