Dr. Peter Hayes holds degrees from Bowdoin, Oxford, and Yale and was from 1980 to 2016 Professor of History and German and from 2000 to 2016 Theodore Zev Weiss Holocaust Educational Foundation Professor at Northwestern University. His publications have won several prizes and been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Slovak, and Spanish. His works on the Holocaust include not only Why? Explaining the Holocaust (2017), but also How Was It Possible? A Holocaust Reader (2015), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (2010) that he edited with John K. Roth; and German Railroads, Jewish Souls (2020), a study of deportation trains that he and Christopher Browning assembled around two path-breaking essays by the late Raul Hilberg. From 2014 to 2019, Hayes chaired the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, on which he served for a total of twenty years. Also an award-winning teacher, he lectures widely on German and Holocaust history in the United States and abroad.