Peter F. Hayes is professor emeritus of history at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University,[1][2][3] and chair of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

[8] Hayes was born in the Boston area to an Irish Catholic family; when he and his three siblings were older, his mother worked as a secretary for Honeywell.

[9] After attending middle and high school in Framingham, MA, Hayes completed his AB in government in 1968 at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine, where he was supervised by John Rensenbrink for his senior thesis on African politics.

[9] He graduated from Oxford with a BA in 1971, then studied history at Yale University, where he was taught by Henry Ashby Turner, obtaining an MA in 1974, MPhil in 1976 and PhD in 1982.

[9] His first book, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (1987), a study of the relationship between the Nazi Party and IG Farben, a German chemical company, was awarded the Biennial Book Prize by the Conference Group for Central European History, American Historical Association.