Leonard V. Smith ’80

Education

• BA, Oberlin College, 1980
• MIA, School of International Affairs, Columbia University, 1982
• PhD, Columbia University, 1990

Biography

Leonard V. Smith’s teaching interests include modern Europe, war and society, and French imperialism.

In the 2018-19 academic year, he will teach; lecture courses on Europe 1900-1945 and on Modern European History; a research seminar on World War II; and the Senior Projects course.

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.