Isabel Virginia Hull (born 1949) is John Stambaugh Professor Emerita of History and the former chair of the history department at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to tea ...

. 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 appr ...

''.

Education

Hull received her B.A. from the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

in 1970 and her Ph.D. 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 w ...

in 1978. She teaches courses on European

fascism Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy and t ...

World War I World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, ...

, German history 1648–present, and

international law International law (also known as public international law and the law of nations) is the set of rules, norms, and standards generally recognized as binding between states. It establishes normative guidelines and a common conceptual framework for ...

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 during and after World War I in an effort to restrict the maritime supply of goods to the Central Powers, w ...

. The book was criticized by other historians for failing "to take considerations of morality and, perhaps more importantly, legitimacy f the blockadeinto account". Michael Geyer 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 The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

and has been a

Guggenheim Fellow 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 ...

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