Helmut Walser Smith
Director, Max Kade Center for European & German Studies
Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History (Ph.D. Yale)
Early Modern and Modern German History

Education

  B.A. Cornell
  Ph.D. Yale

Research Area

  Modern German History

Recent Books

                         

 

Recent Articles

"For a Differently Centered Central European History: Reflections on Jürgen Osterhammel's Geschichtswissenschaft Jenseits des Nationalstaates," Central European History, 37,1(2004), 115-136.

"The Vanishing Point of German History: An Essay on Perspective," History and Memory, 17, 1/2(2005), 267-295.

"Borders and Bridges: The 'Cosmopolitan Competencies' of Prussia's Vanished Nationalities," in: Germany from the Margins, ed. Mark Roseman et al. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2006); in German as
"An Preußens Rändern: Oder die Welt die dem Nationalismus verloren ging." in Das Kaiserreich Transnational, ed. Sebastian Conrad and Jürgen Osterhammel (Goettingen, 2004),149-169.

"Anti-Semitic Violence as Reenactment: An Essay in Cultural History," Rethinking History 11, 3 (September 2007), 335-351.

Helmut Walser Smith, "When the Sonderweg Debate Left Us," German Studies Review, 31,2(May, 2008),  225-240; in German as "Jenseits der Sonderweg-Debatte," in  Das deutsche Kaiserreich in der Kontroverse, ed. Sven Oliver Müller und Cornelius Torp (Göettingen, 2009), 31-50.

Recent Honors and Fellowships

Fraenkel Prize of the Wiener Library and the Institute for Contemporary History, London (for The Butcher's Tale)

L.A. Times Non-fiction Book of the Year, 2002 (The Butcher's Tale)

German magazine Damals list as one of the three most innovative non-fiction works of 2002, for the German translation of The Butcher's Tale.

Finalist, National Jewish Book Award (The Butcher's Tale)

Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, Vanderbilt University, 1997

J.P. Morgan Prize Fellowship, American Academy in Berlin, 2005  

Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, 2003/4

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