Mark A. Lewis

Prof. Lewis was trained as a historian of Germany and Southeastern Europe (the Balkans) at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he obtained a Ph.D. in history. He also graduated from Stanford University in an undergraduate program called "Modern Thought and Literature." At the College of Staten Island, he teaches the history of modern Germany (1740-2008), the history of the Balkans (1453-1990s), the Holocaust (covering multiple countries in Europe), 20^th century European history, social and political ideologies, historiography, and the senior capstone seminar (where students write a research paper based on original sources). He also teaches a first-year undergrad course (HST 112) about the history of technology from 1500-present. He is very interested in transnational and comparative history, which he employs in his survey courses.

He is on the faculty of the History Ph.D. program at the CUNY Graduate Center.

As a researcher, he is interested in the history of international criminal law, comparative genocide, the history of crime and punishment (including ideas of social and political order), and the history of policing.

His book The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919-1950 (Oxford University Press, 2014, paperback 2016) is a history of the idea of international criminal courts and international criminal jurisdictions, which he examines from the perspective of jurists and non-state institutions which propelled these ideas. He hypothesizes that although there were existing codes dealing with the laws of war prior to the First World War, the war catalyzed the new field of international criminal law and led to new discussions in several legal areas about how individual criminal liability could be added to a variety of crimes—not only war crimes, but also aggressive war, terrorism, genocide, and crimes against humanity (systematic, widespread attacks against civilians). This book includes analyses of the negotiations concerning international criminal courts at the Paris Peace Conference, attempts to create a permanent international criminal court through the League of Nations in the interwar period, lobbying efforts to have the extermination of European Jewry included in the first Nuremberg trial, the drafting and negotiation of the U.N. Genocide Convention, and the creation of the “graves breaches” clauses in the Geneva Conventions of 1948. The book argues that all these efforts cannot fit into a historical narrative of a “liberal internationalist or cosmopolitan drive” during the first half of the twentieth century, as there were numerous inputs, non-governmental organizations, and ideologies involved. The book won the Wiener Library’s Fraenkel Prize in 2013 and the inaugural Bronisław Geremek Prize, issued by the Geremek Foundation and the College of Europe (Natolin/Warsaw) in 2015, “for an outstanding academic book in the field of European civilization and history.”

With the late Jacob Frank, he is the co-author of Himmler’s Jewish Tailor: The Story of Holocaust Survivor Jacob Frank (Syracuse University Press, 2000). This is an oral history of a Polish Jewish tailor who was the head of a clothing factory at the Lipowa Street labor camp in Lublin, run by the SS. Frank, one of the few survivors of the Lublin ghetto, describes ghetto life, the Nazi production system, and the liquidation of the ghetto in 1942. He relates the murder of his wife and two boys at Majdanek. He explain his loss in status as head of the clothing operations at Lipowa and his experiences in the camps of Natzweiler and Dachau. He served as a witness in West German war crimes trials in Frankfurt in the 1970s, including the trial of Lipowa commandant Wolfgang Mohwinkel. The book is based on the idea that Holocaust history can be more direct and authentic if it is transmitted in the survivor’s actual dialect and includes dialogue with an interlocutor, rather than as a ghost-written memoir or literary work. It was influenced by Lawrence Langer’s concept that Holocaust testimony was not heroic, and that there are types of memory that are painful, discomfiting, and not easily categorized into the morality of right and wrong.

Prof. Lewis has also studied the evolution of political policing and criminal policing the late Habsburg Empire (during the First World War) and in Austria during the inter-war and Nazi periods. Some of his published papers include “Die Wiener Polizei im Nationalsozialismus. Zwischen Instrumentalisierung und Eigenverantwortung” [The Vienna Police under National Socialism. Between Instrumentalization and Individual Responsibility] in Exekutive der Gewalt. Die österreichische Polizei und der Nationalsozialismus (Böhlau, 2024); “Continuity and Change in the Vienna Police Force, 1914-1945“ in Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation (2019-20), Part I and Part II; “The Failed Quest for Total Surveillance: The Internal Security Service in Austria Hungary during World War I,” in World War I in Central and Eastern Europe: Politics, Conflict and Military Experience (I.B. Tauris, 2018); and “The Failure of the Austrian and Yugoslav Police to Repress the Croatian Ustaša in Austria:  1929-1934,” Austrian History Yearbook 45 (2014): 188-212. He was a Research Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies in 2016-17. For this research on policing, he has used archives in Austria, Croatia, Germany, and Poland, examining material in German, Croatian, French, and Polish. He has also worked extensively with hand-written sources.