Dr. Michelle Lynn Kahn
-
Profile
Dr. Michelle Lynn Kahn is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Richmond, and a 2025-26 Fellow at the National Humanities Center. 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.
Kahn 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. It exposes how American white power extremists have strategically leveraged their freedom of speech to evade German censorship laws and spread hate, propaganda, and violence across borders. 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. She has an ongoing interest in queer fascism and the role of gender and sexuality in 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 arrived as “guest workers” (Gastarbeiter) between 1961 and 1973. By the 1980s, amid rising racism, neo-Nazis and ordinary Germans blamed Turks for unemployment, criticized their Muslim faith, and argued they could never integrate. In 1983, policymakers enacted a controversial law: paying Turks to leave. Thus commenced one of modern Europe's largest and fastest waves of remigration: within one year, 15% of the migrants—250,000 men, women, and children—returned to Turkey. Their homeland, however, ostracized them as culturally estranged “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Through archival research and oral history interviews in both countries and languages, the book highlights migrants’ personal stories and reveals how many felt foreign in two homelands.
Kahn is also co-editor of Racism and Anti-Racism in Divided Germany, an essay collection that is forthcoming with Cornell University Press. This book brings together new scholarship on the history of racialization and anti-racist activism in both East and West Germany during the Cold War and since unification, focusing on the 1970s to 1990s.
Kahn was awarded the 2022 Chester Penn Higby Prize of the American Historical Association’s Modern European History Section, as well as 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 Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam, and the Central European History Society, among others. From 2015 to 2017, she was a Research Associate at the Documentation Centre and Museum of Migration to Germany (DOMiD e.V.). She is an editor of the journal Contemporary European History, and she serves on the editorial board of The New Fascism Syllabus.
[Kahn is on sabbatical leave for the 2025-26 academic year.]
- Publications