Peter Hayes

Peter F. Hayes (born 1946) is professor emeritus of history at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University, and former chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Specializing in the Holocaust, genocide and the history of modern Germany, He has been described as the leading scholar of the historiography of industry in Nazi Germany.

Early life and education Hayes was born in the Boston area to an Irish Catholic family; when he and his three siblings were older, his mother worked as a secretary for Honeywell. After attending middle and high school in Framingham, MA, Hayes completed his AB in government in 1968 at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, where he was supervised by John Rensenbrink for his senior thesis on African politics.

He had intended to study law but instead became interested in history after winning a Keasbey Scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics; From 2009 until 2014 he was chair of Northwestern's history department.

Personal life Hayes lives in Chicago with his husband, Voltaire Miran, and their miniature poodles, Boden and Bobsie.

Selected works (1986) with Volker Durr and Kathy Harms, eds. Imperial Germany. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. (1987) Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1991), ed. Lessons and Legacies I: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (1999), ed. Lessons and Legacies III: Memory, Memorialization and Denial. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (2002) with David Mickenberg and Corinne Granof, eds. The Last Expression: Art and Auschwitz. Block Museum. (2004) From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2010) with Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei and Moshe Zimmermann. Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik. Karl Blessing Verlag. (2010) with John K. Roth, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. (2015), ed. How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. (2017) Why? Explaining the Holocaust. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. (2019) with Christopher Browning and Raul Hilberg, German Railroads, Jewish Souls: The Reichsbahn, Bureaucracy, and the Final Solution. New York: Berghahn Books. (2025) Profits and Persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press.