Education
- Ph.D. in History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (NJ, USA)
- M.A. in History, CUNY Graduate Center & CCNY
- B.A. in History, Queens College, CUNY
Research Interests
- Border Studies, Partition, Nationalism, Forced Migration, Identity Politics
- Colonialism, Religion and Politics
- Historical Culture and History Education
- Transnational and Comparative History
- Central Europe, Middle East and North Africa, South Asia (20th century)
Biography
Dr. Peter (Ibrahim) Polak Springer is a historian specializing in border studies, transnational history, and cultural history, with a focus on partition, nationalism, forced migration, historical culture, and history education—particularly in the context of Central Europe and the Middle East from 1918 to the present. His research adopts transnational and comparative perspectives, exploring themes such as identity politics in contested borderlands and nationalism in sacred spaces. He also investigates how European history is represented in history and social studies textbooks across the Arab world. Currently, he is expanding his comparative work on partition studies and history education to include case studies from South Asia.
His monograph is a transnational history of Upper Silesia, a borderland contested between Poland and Germany from 1918 to 1989, highlighting the roles of nationalism and cultural politics in border conflicts, partition, and forced migration. This case study also explores the diverse cultural dimensions of border contests and partitions, including historical culture, youth political engagement, and the shaping of architecture and cityscapes. In several articles and chapters, he examines nationalism and territorial border disputes in Qatar, the Arabian Gulf, and Mandatory Palestine—treating these as transnational phenomena transmitted within a colonial framework from Europe during 1918–1945. His latest research focuses on the construction of national histories and historical cultures in the Arabian Gulf, with a particular emphasis on Qatar, as well as on how narratives of Europe are represented in Arab national histories through school textbooks.
He has published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Borderlands Studies, Contemporary European History, and Central European History. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, Fulbright-Hays, and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). His has taught courses on Modern and Contemporary European history, Qatar and Arabian Gulf history, global history, intellectual history, and political geography. He has held affiliations with respected institutions including Europa-Universität Viadrina, Rutgers University, Freie Universität Berlin, Qatar University, the University of Silesia, and the Center for Historical Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
Selected Publications
Book
- Recovered Territory: A German-Polish Conflict Over Land and Culture, 1919–1989. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015.
Recent Articles
- “Between Empires: Narratives of Qatar’s Battle of Wajba in Ottoman and British Archival Records and the Qatari Master Narrative.” Journal of Arabian Studies (forthcoming).
- “Bordering Zubara: Oil Politics, the 1937 Qatari-Bahraini Conflict, and the Making of a Modern Arabian Gulf Borderland.” Journal of Borderlands Studies, 37:5 (2022).
- “Gain Weight, Have Fun, Discover the Fatherland: German-Polish Summer Youth Exchange and Interwar Irredentism.” Contemporary European History, 30:2 (2021).
Book Chapters
- “‘Jihad against the Jews’: Anti-Semitism in Interwar Eastern Europe in the Eyes of the Arab Press of Mandatory Palestine.” In Mobility Dynamics between Eastern Europe and the Near East. Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2024.
Grants & Fellowships
- ACLS-Mellon Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellowship
- Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship
- SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship
- Berlin Program Fellowship, Freie Universität Berlin
Languages
- English
- Polish
- German
- Arabic
Teaching Experience
- University of Silesia: Twentieth-Century Social History, Islamophobia & Multiculturalism, Political Geography
- Qatar University: History of Qatar & the Gulf, Europe and the World, Nationalism, Intellectual History, Introduction to History, Capstone
- Rutgers University & Europa-Universität Viadrina: European History, Political Thought, Academic Writing
Media Contributions
- Interviewed by Al Jazeera, Al-Arabi TV, and Al-Rayyan Channel on history, partition, and cultural heritage in the Middle East
