Leonard V. Smith

Frederick B. Artz Professor of History Leonard V. Smith gave a lecture on March 26 at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, on liberalism in Texas and French Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s. Smith will continue work on this project in 2025-26 as Bill and Rita Clements Senior Fellow at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

In July, a book by Frederick B. Artz Professor of History Leonard V. Smith, French Colonialism from the Ancien Régime to the Present, was published in the New Approaches to European History series by Cambridge University Press. It is dedicated to the Oberlin students who took History 282, the course on which the book is based.

Frederick B. Artz Professor of History Leonard V. Smith published two articles continuing his research on the history of international law: “State Sovereignty,” in Peter Jackson, William Mulligan, and Glenda Sluga, eds., Peacemaking and International Order After the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), and “International Law and the Greek-Bulgarian and Greek-Turkish Population Exchanges,” in Jonathan Conlin and Ozan Ozavci, eds., They All Made Peace—What is Peace?: The 1923 Lausanne Treaty and the New Imperial Order (London: Ginko Library, 2023).

Leonard V. Smith has recently published two articles, “The Armistices of 1918,” Richerche Stroriche 52: 2 (2022): 9-25; and “The Politics of Recognition at the Paris Peace Conference,” in Postwar Continuity and New Challenges in Central Europe, 1918-1923: The War that Never Ended, Tomasz Pudłocki and Kamil Ruszała, eds., (Routledge, 2022), 9-34. Both are extrapolations from his most recent book, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (Oxford, 2018).

Frederick B. Artz Professor of History Leonard V. Smith has been awarded a three-month, Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship at the European University Institute. The institute is located in a villa just outside Florence, Italy. He will begin work on a project comparing law, liberalism, and racial exclusion in 19th century Texas and French Algeria.

Leonard V. Smith ’80, Frederick B Artz Professor of History, published an article titled: "Sovereignty under the League of Nations Mandates: The Jurists' Debates," in the December 2019 issue of Journal of the History of International Law. The article argues that mandates after World War I were never "colonies" in a traditional legal sense and that jurists were never able to agree on just what they were instead.