Helmut Walser Smith

Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History
Professor of German Studies

Helmut Walser Smith is a historian of modern Germany, with particular interests in the history of nation-building and nationalism, religious history, and the history of anti-Semitism. He is the author of German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 1870-1914 (Princeton, 1995), and a number of edited collections, including The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800-1914 (Oxford, 2001), The Holocaust and other Genocides: History, Representation, Ethics (Nashville, 2002), and, with Werner Bergmann and Christhard Hoffmann, Exclusionary Violence: Antisemitic Riots in Modern German History (Ann Arbor, 2002). His book, The Butcher's Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York, 2002), received the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History and was an L.A. Times Non-Fiction Book of the Year. It has also been translated into French, Dutch, and German, where it received an accolade as one of the three most innovative works of history published in 2002. Smith has recently completed The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2008), and he is the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011). He is also working on The Discovery of Germany: A Cultural History, 1500-present, which will appear with W.W. Norton and C.H. Beck in German. His research has been funded by the NEH, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. At Vanderbilt, he teaches a wide variety of courses in European history and in historical methodology. In 1997, he received the Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.