Campus Am Neuen Palais
Haus 11, 1.Z.05
(mezzanine!)
consulting hours
by appointment
Alex J. Kay has taught at the Chair of Military History / Cultural History of Violence since 2017. As of March 2022, he is the holder of a three-year German Research Foundation scholarship as a member of the research unit "Military Cultures of Violence: Illegitimate Military Violence from the Early Modern Period to the Second World War". In 2016, he was also elected lifetime Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. From 2014 to 2016, Dr Kay was Senior Academic Project Coordinator at the Institute of Contemporary History Munich–Berlin (IfZ).
After completing his university studies in history at the Universities of Huddersfield (BA) and Sheffield (MA), England, Dr Kay obtained his PhD in Modern and Contemporary History in 2005 from the Humboldt University, Berlin, where he also taught courses on British history during the early modern period. In addition, he has delivered lectures and talks at conferences and workshops in the USA, Austria, the UK, Germany, Poland, Russia and Hungary. In 2006, he was awarded the Journal of Contemporary History’s first George L. Mosse Prize.
His main research and teaching topics are the history of Germany between 1870 and 1945, National Socialist policies of annihilation, and comparative genocide and mass violence. Dr Kay is the author of Exploitation, Resettlement, Mass Murder: Political and Economic Planning for German Occupation Policy in the Soviet Union, 1940–1941 (New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006), The Making of an SS Killer: The Life of Colonel Alfred Filbert, 1905–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016, German edition 2017), Empire of Destruction: A History of Nazi Mass Killing (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 2021, German edition 2023) and twenty book chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals, as well as co-editor of Nazi Policy on the Eastern Front, 1941: Total War, Genocide, and Radicalization (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012) and Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Europe (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018).
Dr Kay is an external referee for Yale University Press and the scholarly journals Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Journal of Genocide Research.
Approximately 35 reviews to date in the following newspapers and journals:
Semester | Type | Location | Title |
---|---|---|---|
WS 2021/22 | Seminar (MA) | Genocide Through the Ages | |
Seminar (MA) | From Napoleon to Hitler: The Road to Total War, 1792–1945 | ||
Reading Course (MA) | From Napoleon to Hitler: The Road to Total War, 1792–1945 | ||
WS 2020/21 | Seminar (MA) | Mass Violence during the Second World War: Sources and Literature | |
Seminar (BA) | Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten und Schreiben für Historikerinnen und Historiker | ||
SS 2020 | Seminar (MA) | Genocide since 1945 | |
WS 2019/20 | Seminar (MA) | Selected Holocaust Documents in English | |
Seminar (BA) | Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten und Schreiben für Historiker | ||
SS 2019 | Seminar (MA) | Genocide since 1945 | |
WS 2018/19 | Seminar (MA) | Holocaust Survivor Testimonies in English | |
WS 2017/18 | Selected Holocaust Documents in English | ||
WS 2005/06 | Seminar | Regicide to Restoration: England’s Decade as a Republic | |
SS 2005 | Civil War and Revolution in Britain, 1640–1649 |