Prominent Holocaust expert speaks at GVSU

Professor Peter Hayes of Northwestern University will visit Grand Valley State University to deliver two lectures about the Holocaust.

His first lecture, “The Holocaust: Myths and Misconceptions,” will be Thursday, April 8, at 7 p.m. in Loosemore Auditorium of the DeVos Center, Pew Grand Rapids Campus.

Hayes’ second lecture, “German Corporate Complicity in the Holocaust: Causes and Forms,” will be Friday, April 9, at 11 a.m. in the Pere Marquette Room of the Kirkhof Center on the Allendale Campus.

Hayes said the study of the Holocaust has made great advances during the past two decades, but myths and misconceptions persist about many aspects of the subject, especially among the general public. Hayes will discuss the most misleading of these notions and show that historical research has made them untenable.

Hayes is a professor of history and German, a Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor of Holocaust Studies, a Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, and chair of the Department of History at Northwestern University, where he has taught since 1980.

He holds degrees from Bowdoin College, the University of Oxford, and Yale University, and is the author or editor of nine books — including the prize-winning titles, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (Cambridge University Press, 1987; new edition, 2000) and Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Northwestern University Press, 1991), From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich (Cambridge/Beck, 2004), and The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010).

He serves on the Academic Committee of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and as the only American member of the Independent Historians Commission on the History of the German Foreign Office under Nazism and in Its Aftermath. 

The lectures are sponsored by the Joseph Stevens Freedom Endowment, Grand Valley’s Frederik Meijer Honors College, and the College of Interdisciplinary Studies. For more information, contact Rob Franciosi at (616) 331-3069.