Irene Guenther
Honors College Faculty
Email: ivguenth@central.uh.edu
CV
Irene Guenther specializes in 20th century American and European history. She received her doctorate from The University of Texas in 2001. Her teaching interests include genocide and human rights, the construction of "race" and the consequences of systemic racism in the United States, Nazi cultural policies and comparative Second World War home fronts. She has published on the Nazi takeover of the German-Jewish fashion industry; the contested politics of women’s clothing in the four occupied zones of Germany after World War II; magical realism from 1920s Germany to 1940s Latin America; and the anti-war artists of the First World War. Her first book, "Nazi ‘Chic’? Fashioning Women in the Third Reich," won the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award for best fashion history book of the year and the Sierra Prize, given by the Western Association of Women Historians. Her second book, "Postcards from the Trenches: A German Soldier’s Testimony of the Great War," was published in late 2018 and was accompanied by a centennial exhibition of WWI soldiers’ art. She has received the Ross Lence Teaching Award, the Wong Faculty Engagement Award, the Lerner Family Faculty Fellowship Award, the Honors College Dean’s Master Teacher Award and the UH Provost’s Teaching Excellence Award.