Helmut Walser Smith (born 10 December 1962, in

Freiburg, Germany Freiburg im Breisgau (; abbreviated as Freiburg i. Br. or Freiburg i. B.; Low Alemannic: ''Friburg im Brisgau''), commonly referred to as Freiburg, is an independent city in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. With a population of about 230,000 (as o ...

) was named in 2004 to the

Martha Rivers Ingram Martha Robinson Rivers Ingram (born August 20, 1935) is an American billionaire businesswoman and philanthropist. In 1995, Ingram succeeded her late husband as chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Ingram Industries, one of America's lar ...

chair as Professor of History at Vanderbilt University

His teaching and writing focus on modern

German history The Germani tribes i.e. Germanic tribes are now considered to be related to the Jastorf culture before expanding and interacting with the other peoples. The concept of a region for Germanic tribes is traced to time of Julius Caesar, a Roman gen ...

, especially the long nineteenth century. He has served on the editorial boards of '' Central European History'' and the ''Journal of Modern History'' and in 2011–12 was past president of the Conference Group on Central European History of the

American Historical Association The American Historical Association (AHA) is the oldest professional association of historians in the United States and the largest such organization in the world. Founded in 1884, the AHA works to protect academic freedom, develop professional s ...

. From 2005 to 2008, he was Director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt and in 2014 received a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

. Smith earned a B.A. at Cornell University in 1984, and received his PhD from

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

in 1992, where his 1991 dissertation was on nationalism and religion in

Wilhelmine The Wilhelmine Period () comprises the period of German history between 1890 and 1918, embracing the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II in the German Empire from the resignation of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck until the end of World War I and Wilhelm' ...

Germany.

Monographs

* ''German Nationalism and Religious Conflict'' (Princeton, 1995) * ''The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town'' (New York, 2002) * ''Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800-1914'', ed. (Oxford, 2002) * ''Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History'', co-ed. with Werner Bergmann and Christhard Hoffmann (Ann Arbor, 2002) * ''The Holocaust and other Genocides: History, Representation, Ethics'', ed. (Nashville, 2002) * ''The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century'' (New York, 2008) * ''The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History'', ed. (Oxford, 2011). * ''Germany. A Nation in Its Time. Before, During, and After Nationalism'' (New York, 2020)

Essays

* "The Vanishing Point of German History: An Essay on Perspective." History and Memory 17, no. 2 (Spring–Winter 2005): 267–295.

References

1. http://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/helmut-smith 2. http://as.vanderbilt.edu/german/bio/helmut-smith-german {{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Helmut Walser Living people 1962 births Historians of Germany 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers Vanderbilt University faculty American male non-fiction writers