Michelle Lynn Kahn (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Michelle Lynn Kahn is an associate professor of modern European history at the University of Richmond. She is a scholar of the global and transnational history of Germany after 1945, with expertise in far-right extremism, migration, racism, gender, and sexuality. She currently researches the transnational far-right and is writing a book tentatively titled Neo-Nazis in Germany and the United States: An Entangled History of Hate, 1945–2000. This book investigates the deep, dark web of transatlantic connections between German and American neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, and white supremacists from the end of World War II in 1945 through the rise of the internet era in the 1990s. Relatedly, Kahn is tracing German neo-Nazis’ connections to far-right extremists across the globe (including in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa), as well as investigating the history of queer fascism and homosexuality within far-right movements.

Her previous book, Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History (Cambridge University Press, 2024), explores the transnational history of Turkish migrants, Germany’s largest ethnic minority, who became the primary targets of German racism since the Holocaust. Kahn is also the coeditor of Racism and Anti-Racism in Divided Germany, an essay collection that is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. She was awarded the 2022 Chester Penn Higby Prize of the American Historical Association’s Modern European History Section and the 2019 Fritz Stern Prize of the German Historical Institute. Her work has been generously supported by the National Humanities Center, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Historical Association, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Jewish Archives, and the Central European History Society. She is an editor of the journal Contemporary European History and serves on the editorial board of The New Fascism Syllabus.

Selected Publications

• Kahn, Michelle Lynn. Foreign in Two Homelands: Racism, Return Migration, and Turkish-German History. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
• Kahn, Michelle Lynn. “Antisemitism, Holocaust Denial, and Germany’s Far Right: How the AfD Tiptoes around Nazism.” The Journal of Holocaust Research 36, no. 2–3 (2022): 164–85.
• Kahn, Michelle Lynn. “Rethinking Central Europe as a Migration Space: From the Ottoman Empire through the Cold War and the Refugee Crisis.” Central European History 55, no. 1 (March 2022): 118–37.
• Kahn, Michelle Lynn. “The American Influence on German Neo-Nazism: An Entangled History of Hate, 1970s–1990s.” The Journal of Holocaust Research 35, no. 2 (May 2021): 91–105.
• Kahn, Michelle Lynn. “The Long Road Home: Vacations and the Making of the ‘Germanized Turk’ Across Cold War Europe.” The Journal of Modern History 93, no. 1 (March 2021): 109–49.