Christopher Browning

Christopher Browning was born in Durham, North Carolina in 1944 but grew up in Chicago. His father was a philosophy professor at Northwestern University and his mother was a nurse. Browning earned a B.A. in history from Oberlin College in 1967 and an M.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968. Browning taught history at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania and St. John’s Military Academy before going on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1975. Since 1978, Browning has written or co-written 10 books on the Holocaust and the history of Hitler’s Final Solution. Browning taught as a professor at Pacific Lutheran University for 25 years and has been a guest lecturer or professor at several prestigious institutions, including Princeton University and Cambridge University. Browning has been called as an expert witness in the trials of accused Nazis in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Browning won his first of three National Jewish Book Awards in 1994 for his book Ordinary Men, and in 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1999, Browning began working at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, where he is currently the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus.