2001-2002 History Series

Dr. Isser Woloch is the Moore Collegiate Professor at Columbia University, where he has taught since 1969. His field is modern European history, with a special interest in the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. He has also taught at Indiana University and UCLA, where he received a distinguished teaching citation. Dr. Woloch has been a fellow of the ACLS, the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEH, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and the center for the History of Freedom at Washington University (St. Louis).

Among Professor Woloch's books are Jacobin Legacy: The Democratic Movement Under the Directory (1970); The French Veteran from the Revolution to the Restoration (1979); Eighteenth-Century Europe: Tradition and Progress (1984); The New Regime: Transformation of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s (1994), which won the American Historical Association's Leo Gershoy Award for the best book in early-modern European history; and Napoleon and His Collaborators: The Making of a Dictatorship (2001). He was the principal American advisor to Dave Grubin's recent PBS documentary, Napoleon.

Elliot West, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, teaches and writes on the history of the American West and frontier, as well as on American environmental history. He has written five books. The most recent, The Contested Plains (University Press of Kansas, 1998) was a main selection of the History Book Club and received several national awards, including the Francis Parkman Prize as the year's outstanding book in American History. He has written as well on western saloons, North Americans on the Great Plains, and children's lives on the frontier. He has twice received the University of Arkansas's awards as teacher of the year and in 1995 was named his state's professor of the year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. A native Texan, he received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Colorado. The father of five, he lives with his family in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Edward J. Larson is the Richard B. Russell Professor of History and Law at the University of Georgia and recipient of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in History. Before accepting a teaching position at Georgia in 1987, he served as Associate Counsel for the U.S. House of Representative Committee of Education and Labor (1983-89) and as an attorney with a major Seattle law firm (1979-83).

The author of four books and over fifty published articles, Larson writes mostly about issues of science, medicine and law from an historical perspective. His books are Evolution's Workshop: God and Science in the Galapagos Islands (2001), Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (1995), Trial and Error: The American Controversy Over Creation and Evolution (1985 and 1989 expanded edition) and the Pulitzer Prize winning Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (1997). His articles have appeared in such varied journals as Nature, Scientific American, The Nation, Oxford American, Wall Street Journal, Virginia Law Review, Journal of the History of Medicine and British Journal for the History of Science. He is the co-editor of four additional books. The Fulbright Program named Larson to the John Adams Chair in American Studies for 2001 and he received the 2000 George Sarton Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Born in central Ohio, he earned a B.A. from Williams College, a law degree from Harvard, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in the History of Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The recipient of several teaching awards, he currently holds a joint appointment in the history department and law school at the University of Georgia, where he teaches the history of science to undergraduates and health, science and technology law to law students. He has also taught in Austria, China, France, New Zealand and the Netherlands. He is married to a pediatrician, Lucy Larson. They have two children, Sarah and Luke. Together, they enjoy travel, hiking, bicycling, and working on their 180-year old house in Athens, Georgia.

Edward L. Shaughnessy is the Lorraine J. and Herrlee G. Creel Professor of Early China at the University of Chicago. A specialist in the cultural history of Bronze Age history, his studies have extended to most aspects of China's early literary tradition. He is particularly interested in integrating archaeologically discovered textual materials with the received literary tradition. Among his publications are, Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1991), I Ching, The Classic of Changes; The First Translation of the Newly Discovered Second Century B.C. Manwangdui Manuscript (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), Before Confucius: Studies in the Creation of the Confucian Classics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), and The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C. (New York: Cambridge U. Press, 1999), of which he was co-editor. He lives with his wife Elena Valussi and their daughter Giulia in Chicago and just outside of Verona, Italy.