Michael Burleigh is an English author and historian whose primary focus is on Nazi Germany and related subjects. He has also been active in bringing history to television.
After a PhD in medieval history from Bedford College, London in 1982, he held posts at New College, Oxford, the London School of Economics and then at Cardiff University, where he was a distinguished research professor in modern history. He has also been Professor of History at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, and Kratter Visiting Professor at Stanford University In 2002 he gave the three Cardinal Basil Hume Memorial Lectures at Heythrop College, University of London. Burleigh is a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Munich and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He founded the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions and is on the editorial boards of Totalitarismus und Demokratie and Ethnic and Racial Studies. Books of his have been translated into Czech, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish and Spanish. He has also been active in bringing history to television audiences. In 1991 he won the British Film Institute Award for Archival Achievement for the Channel 4/Domino Films documentary Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich. In 1993 he gained a New York Film and Television Festival Award Bronze Medal for Heil Herbie: The Story of the Volkswagen Beetle. Burleigh is on the advisory board of the magazine Standpoint and contributes regularly. He won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction in 2001 for The Third Reich: A New History and the Nonino International Master of His Time Prize in 2012. His Small Wars, Far Away Places: The Genesis of the Modern World 1945–65 was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2013. He writes for three English dailies: The Times, the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph.
Personal life
Burleigh has been married since 1991 to Linden Burleigh. They live in South East London.
Selected works
Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich. London: Domino Films.
Prussian Society and the German Order
Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich
The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 – with Wolfgang Wippermann
Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 1900–1945
Ethics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide
