Irene Guenther, Ph.D.

Dr. Irene Guenther is a professor in the University of Houston’s Honors College, with specializations in modern American and European history. Her teaching interests include the two world wars and comparative home fronts, 20th-century genocides and human rights, “race” and the Great Migration, and Nazi cultural policies and the art of resistance. She has published on the Nazis’ decimation of the German-Jewish fashion industry; the contested politics of women’s clothing in the four occupied zones of Germany; Magical Realism from 1920s Germany to 1940s Latin America; art and propaganda in Vichy France; and the anti-war art of the German Expressionists. Her first book, Nazi ‘Chic’? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich, won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Award, as well as the Sierra Prize for the best history book written by a female historian. Her second book, Postcards from the Trenches: A German Soldier’s Testimony of the Great War, was published by Bloomsbury in November 2018. She has received the Ross Lence Teaching Award, the Wong Student Engagement Award, the Lerner Faculty Excellence Award, the Honors College Dean’s Master Teacher Excellence Award, and the UH Provost Teaching Excellence Award.