Heide Fehrenbach, currently Presidential Research Professor of History at Northern Illinois University, stands at the forefront of her generation of social and cultural historians of the Federal Republic and was recently awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for 2007–2008. Her scholarship probes the social and cultural effects of Nazism and World War II, postwar experiences of military occupation and democratization, and transitions in racial and gender ideologies after 1945. She is author of the prize-winning book Cinema in Democratizing Germany (1995), and Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (2005); coauthor, with Rita Chin, Geoff Eley, and Atina Grossmann, of After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and Democracy in Germany and Europe (in press); and editor, with Uta Poiger, of Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (2000).