JACKSON, Tenn. — Sept. 30, 2021 — Award-winning historian David A. Bell will speak at the 24th annual Carls-Schwerdfeger History Lecture on Oct. 25 at Union University.
An internationally recognized historian of early modern France and Napoleon Bonaparte, Bell serves as the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions at Princeton University.
Bell will host two lectures that are free and open to the public. He will speak in the G.M. Savage Memorial Chapel at 7:15 p.m. on “George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte and the Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution.” Before that, he will lecture on “Napoleon Bonaparte and the Origins of Modern Total War” in the Carl Grant Events Center at 2 p.m.
Bell is a prize-winning author of seven books on European history, including “The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of War As We Know It,” which won the Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
As an alumnus from Harvard University, Bell studied at the highly esteemed École Normale Supérieure in Paris under a Harvard fellowship. Since then, he earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in history at Princeton University, where he has taught since 2010.
Previously, Bell served as the dean for the school of arts and sciences at John Hopkins University and a professor of history at Yale University. In addition, Bell taught as a visiting professor at two of France’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning and a visiting fellow at Tokyo University in Japan.
For more information about the lecture, contact Stephen Carls at (731) 661-5262 or scarls@uu.edu.