Isabel Virginia Hull (born 1949) is John Stambaugh Professor Emerita of History and the former chair of the
history department at
Cornell University. She specializes in German history from 1700 to 1945, with a focus on sociopolitics, political theory, and gender/sexuality. Since January 2006, Hull has served on the editorial board of the ''
Journal of Modern History
''The Journal of Modern History'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering European intellectual, political, and cultural history, published by the University of Chicago Press. Established in 1929, the journal covers events from appro ...
''.
Education
Hull received her B.A. from the
University of Michigan in 1970 and her Ph.D. from
Yale University in 1978. She teaches courses on European
fascism,
World War I, German history 1648–present, and
international law.
Research
The position for which Hull is best known, embodied in her two most recent books, is that Germany before and during World War I was uniquely indifferent to international law among the great powers, and (contrary to established historiography) that its responsibility for bringing the war about was much greater than that of the
Allied powers. In 2014, Hull published ''A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War'', analyzing the Allied
blockade of Germany
The Blockade of Germany, or the Blockade of Europe, occurred from 1914 to 1919. The prolonged naval blockade was conducted by the Allies of World War I, Allies during and after World War I in an effort to restrict the maritime supply of goods t ...
. The book was criticized by other historians for failing "to take considerations of morality and, perhaps more importantly, legitimacy
f the blockade
F, or f, is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ef'' (pronounced ), and the plural is ''efs''.
Hist ...
into account".
Michael Geyer
Michael Geyer is a German historian, and Samuel N. Harper Professor Emeritus of German and European History, at University of Chicago. He is the recipient of the 2012 Axel Springer Berlin Prize and Senior Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin
...
of the University of Chicago has stated that "Isabel V. Hull is one of the most accomplished German historians and surely the best of her generation," and she has been described by
VICE News as "one of America's leading scholars on the role of fascism in history."
[Mike Pearl]
We Asked a Fascism Expert if Donald Trump Is a Fascist
Vice News (December 5, 2015). She is a winner of the
Ralph Waldo Emerson Award The Ralph Waldo Emerson Award is a non-fiction literary award given by the Phi Beta Kappa society, the oldest academic society of the United States, for books that have made the most significant contributions to the humanities. Albert William Levi ...
and the
Leo Gershoy Award (1996), is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been a
Guggenheim Fellow and an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Research Fellow. In 2013, she was awarded the inaugural International Research Support Prize by the Max Weber Stiftung and the Historisches Kolleg.
Bibliography
Books
*
*''Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700–1815''. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.
*''Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany''. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
*''A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War''. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.
Book reviews
External links
Cornell History Department faculty webpage
Notes
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hull, Isabel Virginia
1949 births
Living people
Cornell University Department of History faculty
Cornell University faculty
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Historians of Germany
London Review of Books people
University of Michigan alumni
Yale University alumni