A 2007 Guggenheim Fellow, she studies the history of Germany, and she has authored the books Cinema in Democratizing Germany (1995), Race after Hitler (2005), and After the Nazi Racial State (2009) and co-edited the volumes Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations (1999) and Humanitarian Photography: A History (2015).
[5] She studied at Rutgers University, where she obtained her PhD in modern European history;[6] her thesis Cinema in democratizing Germany: the reconstruction of mass culture and national identity in the West, 1945–1960 was supervised by Victoria de Grazia and Harold Poor.
[10] Fehrenbach won the Conference Group for Central European History's 1997 award for best first book for her 1995 book Cinema in Democratizing Germany,[11] which focuses on the history of film in Germany after the end of World War II.
[12] In 1999, she and Uta Poiger co-edited Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations, a volume on the global impact of Americanization.
[2] In September 2004, she participated in a rally protesting the George W. Bush 2004 presidential campaign nearby Dick Cheney's appearance at the NIU's Convocation Center.