Professional Background
Christopher Probst is a historian, educator, and museum education consultant with a PhD in history from Royal Holloway, University of London. His book, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Church in Nazi Germany, was published in 2012. In 2008, Dr. Probst was a Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Dr. Probst has also authored articles and essays examining Protestant-Jewish relations in Germany before, during, and after the Holocaust. His essay, “Race, Religion, and the Genocide of the Jews in Nazi Germany,” was published in the essay collection, The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Mass Atrocity, and Genocide (2020); “Luther Scholars, Jews, and Judaism during the Third Reich” was published in the essay collection, Betrayal of the Humanities: The University During the Third Reich (Indiana University Press, 2022); “Protestantism in Nazi Germany: A View from the Margins” was published in the essay collection, Life and Times in Nazi Germany (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2016).
Fellowship Research
As a Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellow, Dr. Probst will conduct research for his project, titled “The Jewish Gaze: A German-Jewish History of Württemberg, 1929 to 1949.” He will examine the history of Württemberg during two tumultuous decades — from the last years of the Weimar Republic to the effective end of the Allied occupation of Germany — through Jewish eyes. Dr. Probst will draw on multiple Museum collections to further this work, including the records of the Jewish community of Stuttgart and of the Confessing Church community in Württemberg. He later plans to include the results of this research in his upcoming book project on the history of the Jewish community of Württemberg from late Weimar to the early postwar era.
Residency Period: November 1, 2026 - April 30, 2027