Education
- BA, Oberlin College, 1980
- MIA, School of International Affairs, Columbia University, 1982
- PhD, Columbia University, 1990
Biography
Leonard V. Smith’s is serving as interim chair of the history department for the 2019-2020 academic year.
His teaching interests include modern Europe, war and society, and French imperialism.
In the 2018-19 academic year, he will teach a First-Year Seminar on the French Revolution, as well as lecture courses on World War II and on Modern European History.
His most recent book, Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, was published in May 2018 by Oxford University Press. A coauthored book was published in September 2018, by Éditions Les Arènes in Paris: Ils ont fait la paix: le Traité de Versailles vu de France et d’ailleurs [They Made Peace: The Treaty of Versailles Seen from France and Beyond], directed by Serge Berstein (with John Keiger, Sergio Romano, Toshio Takemoto, and Gerd Krumeich).
Smith also is the author of The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War (Cornell University Press, 2007); France and the Great War, 1914-1918, with Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division During World War I (Princeton University Press, 1994).
He has held fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center.
Smith has been a visiting professor at the Mershon Center, Ohio State University in spring 2015; École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in January 2012, Claremont McKenna College in fall 2008, as William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow, and at the Associated Kyoto Program at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, in fall 2004.
- Ils ont fait la paix: le Traité de Versailles vu de France et d’ailleurs [They Made Peace: The Treaty of Versailles Seen from France and Beyond], (coauthor), Éditions Les Arènes in Paris, September 2018
- Sovereignty at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Oxford University Press, May 2018
- The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War, Cornell University Press, 2007
- France and the Great War, 1914-1918, with Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, Cambridge University Press, 2003
- Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division During World War I, Princeton University Press, 1994
Notes
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Leonard V. Smith Publishes Article
January 31, 2020Leonard 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.
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Leonard Smith Receives Grant for Book Research
September 27, 2019Professor of History Leonard Smith is writing a book for Cambridge University Press on the history of French colonialism from the Old Regime to the present. In support of the project, he received funding from Oberlin's Luce Initiative on Asian Studies and the Environment (LIASE) implementation grant for travel to Vietnam during winter term 2020, to study the environmental footprint left by the French.