Gunnar S. Paulsson

Gunnar Svante Paulsson (also known as Steve Paulsson) is a Swedish-born Canadian historian, university lecturer, and author who has taught in Britain, Canada, Germany, and Italy. He specializes in history of The Holocaust and has been described as "an expert on that period". He is best known for his 2002 book, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945.

Paulsson's book, Secret City, is a social history of the Jews who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto and tried to survive, living illegally "on the Aryan side". In its original form as his doctoral thesis, it was awarded the Franklin Prize in Contemporary History (1998). The English edition was awarded the biennial PSA/Orbis (now Kulczycki Prize) in 2004, and the Polish edition, Utajone Miasto: Żydzi po "aryjskiej" stronie Warszawy 1940-1945 (Znak, 2007) was awarded the inaugural Moczarski Prize (pl) for the 2009 best book in history.

Paulsson graduated from Carleton University in 1968 with a degree in psychology and worked in an unrelated career until 1989 when he began graduate study in history at the University of Toronto. He completed a D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in Modern History in 1998 at Oxford University, while simultaneously holding the position of Lecturer and Director of the Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies at the University of Leicester in 1994–98. He then served as the Senior Historian in the Holocaust Exhibition Project Office at the Imperial War Museum in London in 1998–2000. He was the Koerner visiting fellow and lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and Pearl Resnick fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. He has also taught at the University of Toronto, Viadrina University and the University of Siena.

Paulsson is best known for his book, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940-1945 (Yale University Press, 2002), and his article, "The Bridge over the Øresund: the Historiography on the Expulsion of the Jews from Denmark, 1943."