Franziska Exeler is a Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics and Junior Research Fellow at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. She is also Lecturer of History at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include twentieth-century East European, Russian and German history; war and society; (international) legal history and war crimes trials; myth, memory and trauma; and migration, borders and borderland studies.

Her book Ghosts of War. Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus was published in April 2022 with Cornell University Press. It is the recipient of the 2021 Ernst Fraenkel Prize awarded by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London.

Related research projects analyze how the Soviet prosecution of treason and war crimes fit into the global moment of post-Second World War justice. Tracing the Russian-Austrian-Prussian/German border, a new book project explores concepts, perceptions and experiences of borders across nineteenth and early twentieth-century Eastern Europe.

Franziska 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). More recently, she was a visiting fellow at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University, and DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia.

She holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, an MA in History from Princeton University, and an MA in History, Political Sciences and Economics from Humboldt University Berlin.

Together with Diana Kim (Georgetown University), she is curating the Invisible Histories website, a platform for researchers to present photographs in context and explore hidden narratives. The project is supported by the Joint Center for History of Economics at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. She is also co-coordinating Barriers and Borders, a research network and collaboration between Columbia World Projects and the Centre for History and Economics, supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Publications

Ghosts of War. Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022)

“Nazi Atrocities, International Criminal Law, and War Crimes Trials. The Soviet Union and the Global Moment of Post-World War II Justice,” in: The New Histories of International Criminal Law. Retrials, edited by Immi Tallgren and Thomas Skouteris, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019, 189–219.

"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.