Education
B.A. University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2007
M.A. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2013
M.A. Thesis: “Exhibiting Antifascism: Ravensbrück and the Ambivalences of East German Commemoration, 1945-1989”
PhD University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2019
PhD dissertation: "Constructing and Leveraging 'Flight and Expulsion': Expellee Memory Politics in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1944-1970"
Research Interests
Peter Gengler received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2019. His dissertation, "'Flight and Expulsion’: Expellee Victimhood Narratives and Memory Politics in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1944-1970,” was supported by the Berlin Program and the DAAD during the academic years of 2015 and 2016. Peter's research examined the memory politics of West German refugee associations, who constructed a victimhood narrative that they instrumentalized in arguments for political and social claims. Through colonization of public discourse, they profoundly shaped how Germans remembered and continue to recall the Second World War and wartime traumata. Peter's research generally focuses on postwar German cultural memories of war, dictatorship, the Holocaust, and West and East German political culture.