Jul 22, 2016 - Dr. Sean McMeekin, Professor of History at Bard College in New York State, will speak about “The War of 1914: An Avoidable Catastrophe” on Monday, October 3, 2016, at 7:15 p.m., in Union’s G. M. Savage Memorial Chapel as this year’s Carls-Schwerdfeger History Lecturer. McMeekin will also lecture on “Hostile Takeover: The Bolsheviks Conquer Russia, 1917-1920” in the Carl Grant Events Center, Salon II, at 2:00 p.m.
An internationally recognized authority on early twentieth-century East European and Eurasian history, McMeekin is a prize-winning author of six history books, with a seventh scheduled to appear in 2017. His books include: The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923 (2015), which won the Arthur Goodzeit Book Award from the New York Military Affairs Symposium; July 1914: Countdown to War (2013), which was featured on the front page of the New York Times Book Review section on May 9, 2013; The Russian Origins of the First World War (2011), which obtained the 2011 Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr. Book Prize from the World War I Historical Association; The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power (2010), which received the 2011 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; History’s Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks (2008); and The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Münzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West, 1917-1940 (2004). McMeekin’s forthcoming book will be titled The Russian Revolution.
After receiving a BA in history from Stanford University in 1996, McMeekin earned his MA (1998) and PhD (2001) in modern European history at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, McMeekin did university studies in Paris, Berlin, and Moscow. Before moving to Bard in 2014, McMeekin taught at Koç University in Istanbul, Bilkent University in Ankara, and Yale University.
McMeekin joins a long list of distinguished historians who have served as Carls-Schwerdfeger lecturers since 1997. They have come from such places as Brandeis University, Brown University, Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and Yale University. All of them have produced extensive, widely acclaimed historical scholarship, and all have received prestigious recognitions for their professional work.
