World War I Conference Participants

Michael Adas is the Abraham E. Voorhees Professor and Board of Governors’ Chair at Rutgers University.  His teaching and research have centered on the comparative study of the impact of Western science and technology on European and American colonialism in Asia and Africa.  His recent books include Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell University Press, 5th ed., 2014), which won the Dexter Prize, and Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission (Harvard University Press, 2006).  He is currently working on books on the “Misbegotten Wars” of World War I and Vietnam and Great Power Decline.

Christopher Capozzola is an Associate Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He is the author of Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen, and is at work on Brothers of the Pacific: Soldiers, Citizens, and the Philippines from 1898 to the War on Terror.  He is Co-Curator of “The Volunteers: Americans Join World War I, 1914-1919,” which will open at the National World War I Museum in October 2014 and travel to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in summer 2015.

Daniel Gorman is Associate Professor of History at the University of Waterloo, and the Associate Director of the Ph.D. program in Global Governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs.  He specializes in the modern history of the British Empire, and the history of global governance.  He is the author of The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Imperial Citizenship (Manchester University Press, 2007). He is currently working on a project that assesses the role of the UN as a venue for debates over decolonization from the end of WWII to the early 1960s.

Gretchen Heefner is an Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University.  Her teaching and research focus on U.S. foreign relations and the international history of the U.S., with a focus on the Cold War, militarization, and the intimate relations between national security regimes and the everyday.  Her first book, The Missile Next Door: Cold War Minuteman in the America Heartland (Harvard University Press, 2012) traces the deployment of nuclear missiles across the American heartland in the late 1950s and 1960s.  Dr. Heefner has also published articles on historic memory and the international implications of Hawaiian statehood in the Western Historical Quarterly and the Pacific Historical Review.  Her current research project, tentatively titled “Roads to Nowhere,” examines the role of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in constructing roadways and airstrips in Northern Africa during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Akira Iriye is the Charles Warren Professor of American History, Emeritus, at Harvard University.  He has written widely on international history.  Among his recent publications are Cultural Internationalism and World Order; Global Community: International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World; The Globalizing of America: American Foreign Relations, 1913-1945; Global and Transnational History; and (as editor) Global Interdependence: The World Since 1945.

Julia Irwin is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Florida.  Her research focuses on the place of humanitarianism in 20th century U.S. foreign relations.  Her first book, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (Oxford University Press, 2013) is a history of the diplomatic and cultural significance of U.S. international civilian relief in the early twentieth century.  She is now working on a second book-length project, Catastrophic Diplomacy: A History of U.S. Responses to Global Natural Disaster, which will analyze how U.S. State Department agencies, branches of the U.S. military, American charities and relief organizations, and the U.S. public have responded to foreign disasters in the 20th century.

Matt Jacobs is an Associate Professor at the University of Florida and teaches courses on twentieth century U.S. foreign relations, particularly with the Middle East, and international and world history more broadly.  His first book, Imagining the Middle East: The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918-1967, examines the ways in which an informal network of specialists in academia, business, the government, and the media interpreted the Middle East and the United States’ role there through the middle half of the 20th century.  He has begun work on a book tentatively titled Islam and the U.S., which investigates official and unofficial U.S. responses to the rise of political Islam as a global phenomenon, as well as a second project, which uses sports as a vehicle to examine critical issues in post-1945 international history.

Erez Manela is Professor of History at Harvard University, where he teaches international history and the history of the United States in the world.  His books include the prize-winning The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2007) and (as co-editor) The Shock of the Global:The 1970s in Perspective (Harvard University Press, 2010).  He is currently completing a book, The Eradication of Smallpox, which uses the World Health Organization’s global smallpox eradication program in the 1960s and ’70s to rethink major themes in postwar international history, including superpower relations, the history of international development, and the role of international organizations.  He has also co-edited (with Robert Gerwarth) a volume, Empires at War, 1911-23 (Oxford University Press, 2014) that recasts World War I as a global war among empires rather than a European warn among nation-states.

David Mayers teaches at Boston University, where he holds a joint professorship in the History and Political Science departments.  His two most recent books are Dissenting Voices in America’s Rise to Power (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and FDR’s Ambassadors and the Diplomacy of Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2013).  Mayers is now working on a book tentatively titled After Armageddon: The Reconstruction of International Society, 1945 – 1955.

James McAllister is Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Stanley Kaplan Program in American Foreign Policy at Williams College.  He is the author of No Exit: America and the German Program, 1943-1954 (Cornell, 2002) and his articles on various aspects of the Vietnam War have been published in Modern Asian Studies, Pacific Historical Review, Journal of Vietnamese Studies, and International Security.  He is currently a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation.

Michael Neiberg is Professor of History in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the United States Army War College.  He previously taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy and was the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi.  His published work concentrates on the First and Second World Wars, notably the American and French experiences.  His most recent book on the First World War is Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2011).  In October 2012, Basic Books published The Blood of Free Men, a history of the liberation of Paris in 1944.

Nicole Phelps is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Vermont.  She wrote her first book based on her award-winning dissertation, U.S.-Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference: Sovereignty Transformed (Cambridge University Press, 2013).  Her intellectual interests focus on Europe and the United States from the 1860s-1920s and include the history of the State Department and the evolution and importance of the social and ceremonial aspects of diplomacy (the focus of her second book project, The United States in the World: US Consuls Abroad, 1789-1924); the processes of state and nation building; transnational history, migration, and social networks; the construction of race and national identity; the history of ideas, especially liberalism and milennialism; and the history of crime and law enforcement.

Andrew Preston is Reader in American History and a Fellow of Clare College at Cambridge University, where he also serves as editor of The Historical Journal.  In addition to numerous scholarly articles, he has appeared on national television and radio in the United States and Canada and written for the Globe & Mail, the Boston Globe, ForeignAffairs.com, Politico, and History Today.  His most recent book is Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (Knopf, 2012).

Dietmar Rothermund is Professor Emeritus of South Asian History at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.  His research focuses on the history of Indian political ideas, the country’s agricultural system during the colonial period, the person of Mahatma Gandhi, and Indian economic history.  He is author of many works on Asian history, including A History of India (with H. Kulke) and India: The Rise of an Asian Giant.

Klaus Schwabe is a retired professor of modern history at the Technical University – RWTH – at Aachen, Germany.  His publications encompass international and German-American relations in the 20th century, with special emphasis on the era of World War I and the period after World War II.  His major English language publication is Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany and Peacemaking 1918-19: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1985).

Anders Stephanson is the Andrew and Virginia Rudd Family Foundation Professor of History at Columbia University and specializes in 20th-century American foreign relations as well as history and theory.  His published works include Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (1989) and Manifest Destiny (1995).  He is working on a historiographical book on diplomatic history and a work tentatively entitled The United States as a Cold War.

Tony Smith is the Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University.  His research focus is on human rights and democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy.  He is currently working on the origins of American thinking about democracy promotion abroad in the 17th through the 19th centuries, and the impact this had on Woodrow Wilson and American presidents today.  His most recent publications include an expanded edition of America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2012); “American Democracy Promotion: From Wilson to Obama,” in Michael Cox, editor, Great Britain, U.S. Presidents and American Democracy Promotion (Routledge); “From ‘Fortunate Vagueness’ to Democratic Globalism,” in Milja Kurki and Chirstopher Hobson, eds., Conceptual Politics of Democracy Promotion (Routeloedge, Taylor, Francis, 2011); and American Foreign Policy in Crisis: Wilsonianism in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2009).