PD Dr. Gregor Feindt

Time at IEG: 2014-2025 research associate. Since August 2025 affiliated researcher.

Gregor Feindt studied Eastern European and Modern History, and Slavonic Studies in Bonn and Cracow (Jagiellonian University) and completed a PhD at Bonn on national discourse in Central European Samizdat. His thesis was awarded the Fritz Theodor Epstein-Preis of the Verband der Osteuropahistorikerinnen und –historiker in 2014 and the Johannes-Zilkens-Promotionspreis of the German Academic National Foundation in 2015. In 2015/2016, he was Visiting Professor for history and culture of East Central Europe with a focus on Poland at the University of Bremen.
Since November 2021, he is an associated member of SFB 1482 “Humandifferenzierung”.
Gregor received his habilitation at Kiel University in 2024 with a postdoctoral thesis on “Baťa’s People. Rationalisation, Social Engineering and Differentiation in the Czechoslovak Company Town Zlín, 1918–1948”.

Gregor is a historian of Central Europe and studies the transnational history of Czechoslovakia and Poland in the twentieth century. In his postdoctoral project, he enquires into the cultural history of social engineering and the making of “new (wo)men” in the Czechoslovak shoe company Baťa and the factory town of Zlín. Gregor also works on European Memory and its impact on the integration and disintegration of Europe as a political project. He is interested in processes of human differentiation and contributes to the collaborative research centre 1482 human differentiation. In his next project, we will study the politics of reparations and reconciliation between Poland and Germany after the Second World War.

• Shades of Blue. Claiming Europe in the Age of Disintegration, gemeinsam mit Félix Krawatzek, Friedemann Pestel und Rieke Trimçev, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2025
• From Zlín to the World: Transfer, Emigration and Personal Agency of Jewish Employees of the Bat’a shoe company, 1938-1940, in: Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts/Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 18 (2019 [2022]), S. 27–52, https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666370991.113
• Making and Unmaking Socialist Modernities. Seven Interventions into the Writing of Contemporary History on Central and Eastern Europe, in: European History Yearbook 19 (2018), S. 133–154, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110581508-008
• Auf der Suche nach politischer Gemeinschaft. Oppositionelles Denken zur Nation im ostmitteleuropäischen Samizdat: 1976–1992 (Ordnungssysteme 47), Berlin/Bosten: de Gruyter Oldenbourg 2015