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, the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia in the 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 Central Europe and the Middle East from 1918 to the present. He is currently 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 Polish-German borderland contested from 1918 to 1989, and his articles examine nationalism and territorial disputes in Qatar, the Arabian Gulf, and Mandatory Palestine as transnational phenomena. He has held affiliations with Europa-Universität Viadrina, Rutgers University, Freie Universität Berlin, Qatar University, the University of Silesia, and the Polish Academy of Sciences’ Center for Historical Research in Berlin.
Selected Publications
- Recovered Territory: A German-Polish Conflict Over Land and Culture, 1919–1989, Berghahn Books, 2015.
- “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.
Grants & Fellowships
- ACLS-Mellon Recent Doctoral Recipients Fellowship
- Fulbright-Hays Dissertation Fellowship
- SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship
- Berlin Program Fellowship, Freie Universität Berlin
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