William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellows

Academic Year 2008-2009

Fall 2008

Leonard V. Smith is Frederick B. Artz Professor of History at Oberlin College. His most recent book is The Embattled Self: French Soldiers: Testimony of the Great War (Cornell University Press, 2007). He is also the author of Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World War I (Princeton University Press, 1994), co-author of France and the Great War, 1914-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), and co-editor of France at War: Vichy and the Historians (Berg, 2000). Smith has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center, and has been a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the Université de Paris-VII, and in the Associated Kyoto Program at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. During his time on campus, he taught a new course, “International Relations Theory for Historians,” and gave a talk at the Athenaeum on “The Wilsonian Imagination in the Middle East: The King-Crane Commission Report of 1919.”

Spring 2009

Pierre Hassner, research director emeritus at the Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Internationales in Paris, taught for many years as professor of international relations at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris and as a senior visiting lecturer at the European Center of Johns Hopkins University in Bologna. Born in Romania, Mr. Hassner studied at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure. His major writings have focused on war and peace, totalitarianism, ethics and international relations, and international order. Two of his books present selections from his numerous articles: La violence et la paix: De la bombe atomique au nettoyage ethnique (1995; an English translation, Violence and Peace: From the Atomic Bomb to Ethnic Cleansing, appeared in 1997). La terreur et l'empire: Violence et Paix II (2003) has not yet been translated. His most recent co-edited book, Justifier la guerre? De l'humanitaire au contre-terrorisme (2005) has just appeared in English as Justifying War?: From Humanitarian Intervention to Counterterrorism. He gave three lectures at the Athenaeum titled “General Overview: Fear, Pride, and Greed in Thucydides and Today,” “Democratic and Totalitarian Passions in Modern Societies,” and “Rediscovering the Passions in International Relations: History, Philosophy, and the Contemporary World.”