Maria Fritsche

Maria Fritsche is a gender historian with a focus on modern international history, war, military and occupation, justice and post-war society, cinema and film. She studied history, political science and gender studies at the Universities of Vienna and Bern. After completing her PhD in Film History at the University of Portsmouth, UK, she received postdoctoral and research fellowships at the University of Southampton, the German Historical Institute Washington, D.C., and NTNU, where she became an Associate Professor in 2014 and a Professor in 2016. Since joining NTNU, she has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam (2011-2012), the Research Center for Contemporary History (FZH) in Hamburg (2012-2013), the Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) in Munich (2019-2020) and the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) in Amsterdam (2020).
In recent years, she has been researching everyday life under German occupation in Norway during the Second World War, focusing in particular on the complex social relationships between the occupiers and the occupied. The project is part of a larger, nationwide research project on the German occupation of Norway during the Second World War entitled "In a World of Total War. Norway 1940-45", which is led by the Arctic University in Tromsø. She is currently leading the NOS-HS project "Cinema, War and Citizenship at the Periphery. Cinemas and their audiences in the Nordic countries, 1935-1950", which is funded by the Nordic Research Councils. It examines the practices of cinema attendance and screenings as well as the role of cinema in Nordic societies before, during and after the Second World War. The aim is to establish a Nordic network of experts in the field of film history through a series of exploratory workshops. At the same time, she is continuing her long-standing research interest in German court martial law and its role within the Wehrmacht and in occupied Europe during the Second World War.

Maria Fritsche will complete a research stay of several months at the University of Graz in the summer semester of 2025.