Franziska Exeler is Lecturer (equivalent to Assistant Professor) of History at Freie Universität Berlin. She is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for History and Economics at Magdalene College, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include twentieth-century East European, Russian and German history; war and society; (international) legal history and war crimes trials; myth, memory and trauma; and empire, migration, and border regimes.

Her book Ghosts of War. Nazi Occupation and Its Aftermath in Soviet Belarus was published in 2022 with Cornell University Press. It is the recipient of the 2021 Ernst Fraenkel Prize awarded by the Wiener Holocaust Library in London.

Related research analyzes how the Soviet prosecution of treason and war crimes fit into the global moment of post-Second World War justice. Ongoing, collaborative research explores comparative and transnational approaches to the Second World and its legacies in Europe and Asia. Tracing the Russian-Austrian-Prussian/German border from 1815 to 1921, a new book project examines concepts, perceptions and experiences of border regimes across Eastern Europe.

Franziska Exeler's research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Social Science Research Council (International Dissertation Research Fellowship, with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), the European University Institute (Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellowship) and the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (Postdoctoral Fellowship at the International Center for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences). She was also a visiting fellow at the Center for History and Economics at Harvard University and DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg, Russia.

She holds a PhD in History from Princeton University, an MA in History from Princeton University, and an MA in History, Political Sciences and Economics from Humboldt University Berlin.

Together with Diana Kim (Georgetown University), she is curating the Invisible Histories website, a platform for researchers to present photographs in context and explore hidden narratives. The project is supported by the Joint Center for History of Economics at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge. She is also co-coordinating Barriers and Borders, a research network and collaboration between Columbia World Projects and the Centre for History and Economics, supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.