Dr. Julie R. Keresztes

Professional Background

Dr. Julie Keresztes is a historian of modern Germany who specializes in the Third Reich and the Holocaust. She taught at Tufts University from 2020 to 2022 and currently teaches courses on the Holocaust and Nazi Germany at American University. Keresztes received her PhD with distinction from Boston University and is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the German Historical Institute, the Leo Baeck Institute, the American Academy for Jewish Research, and the Central European History Society.

Fellowship Research

During her fellowship, Keresztes will continue work on her book manuscript about photography in Nazi Germany. Photography and the Making of the Nazi Racial Fantasy, 1933-1950 analyzes photography as a social practice through which Germans interpreted and enacted the Nazi fantasy of a racially exclusive community. As the dictatorship consolidated power between 1933 and 1938, Nazi officials promoted photography for all non-Jewish Germans, and their dispossession of Jews in the photographic industry further reinforced the regime’s conflation of photography with racial belonging. Keresztes will also conduct research for her next project, a critical biography of Heinrich Hoffmann, Adolf Hitler’s personal photographer. Through a study of Hoffmann’s enthusiasm for Nazi ideology, antisemitic propaganda, and ruthless profiteering, this project reveals that Hoffmann was not simply a photographer, but precisely the type of man who made the Nazi dictatorship possible and precisely the type of Nazi who ensured that the regime would last for as long as it did.

Residency Period: August 1, 2022–July 31, 2024