Harold Marcuse

In 2012, Marcuse stated that his interests are "history education and public exposure to history (monuments, museums, school curricula, films, ...)" and concerns regarding the effects of the No Child Left Behind Act on "our elementary school."

Marcuse began teaching history at UC Santa Barbara in 1992. He became fascinated with the different ways Germans memorialized events under Hitler's rule. Marcuse's research seeks to answer what people get out of learning about historical events. He examines the ways historical events have been portrayed over time, and the meanings various groups of people have derived from those events and portrayals. Marcuse was instrumental in connecting a student, Collette Waddell, with a Polish Holocaust survivor, Nina Morecki, which led to a book about the Holocaust that discussed not just the era, but how survivors pursued their lives afterward. He has stated that his love of history also resulted in him becoming active in the reform of UC Santa Barbara's General Education requirements between 1997 and 2004.

Marcuse and his first wife (1987–2010) had two children, Aaron (born 1988) and Miriam (born 1993). On the family website, Marcuse stated that he and his first wife separated in 2001 and divorced in 2010. He married again in 2012. He is the grandson of German critical theorist and philosopher Herbert Marcuse. as well as a son of his only child Peter Marcuse.

In 1985, Marcuse co-produced a photographic exhibition on monuments and memorials commemorating events of the Nazi and World War II periods. In 1986, he entered the Ph.D program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to write a dissertation about the post-1945 history of the (former) Dachau concentration camp that examined the legacies of Dachau. Marcuse says that since the end of World War II, much art, literature and public debate in Germany have revolved around the issues of resistance, collaboration and complicity with the Third Reich.

Marcuse majored in physics at Wesleyan University (B.A. 1979, magna cum laude) in Middletown, Connecticut. He earned an M.A. in art history from the University of Hamburg in 1987, with a thesis about a 1949 memorial dedicated "to the Victims of National Socialist Persecution and the Resistance Struggle".

Harold Marcuse (born November 15, 1957 in Waterbury, Connecticut) is an American professor of modern and contemporary German history. He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara.