Robert Gellately

FSU Faculty Profile

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Robert Gellately has written or edited ten books, and his works have appeared in more than twenty foreign languages. His latest monograph is Stalin’s Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War (New York, Alfred A. Knopf and Oxford University Press, 2013). It has thus far been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. It is the sequel to Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, and London, Jonathan Cape, 2007). That book has been translated into German, Norwegian, Czech, Portuguese, Italian, Estonian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and Indonesian.

Professor Gellately’s most recent publication is an edited volume, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), and a Chinese translation is under contract. His first book was The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers in German Politics, 1890-1914 (London, 1974). In 1990 he published the widely discussed The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 (Oxford University Press.) A German translation appeared in 1993 and one in Spanish in 2004.

His book, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2001), aroused international attention. That study has since been published in German, Dutch, Spanish, Czech, Italian, French, Japanese and Portuguese. A special paperback edition was published and distributed by Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education for use as a textbook.

Gellately edited The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). The book has thus far appeared in sixteen foreign languages.

Professor Gellately has co-edited several volumes of essays, including one with Russian specialist, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789-1989 (Chicago University Press, 1997). With FSU colleague Nathan Stoltzfus he co-edited a collection called Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 2001) – which was translated into Turkish. And together with Ben Kiernan, Director of the Genocide Studies program at Yale, he co-edited The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2003). The latter work has since appeared in Italian.

Gellately studied Russian and German history at Memorial University of Newfoundland, did his doctoral work at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and post-doctoral studies in Germany. He has taught at Cornell University and Huron College/University of Western Ontario. From 1998 to 2003 he was the Strassler Professor in Holocaust history at Clark University. In August 2003 he joined the faculty of Florida State University where he is the Earl Ray Beck Professor of History.

In 2004-5 he was selected as the Bertelsmann Visiting Professor of Twentieth Century Jewish Politics and History, at Oxford University. In 2006 he was awarded a Litt. D. (Honorary Doctor of Letters) by Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Gellately has won numerous research awards, including Senior Fellowships from the Alexander von-Humboldt-Foundation in Germany; grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation; and still others from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Professor Gellately teaches a variety of courses, including the comparative history of genocide; racial thought in Europe since 1500; the comparative study of European dictatorships; the comparative history of ideologies; the Holocaust; home fronts in the Second World War; and Europe in the postwar era.