October 28, 2009

Directing the NEH Summer Institute is James W. Muller, Professor of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, and Chairman of the Board of Academic Advisers of the Churchill Centre.  Professor Muller, a student of Churchill since his graduate days at Harvard University, has written, led tours and symposia, and edited several books on and by Churchill.  In 1993-94 he held a Fellowship for College Teachers from NEH to undertake work on The Education of Winston Churchill, a comprehensive survey of Churchill’s writings; that book is almost finished now.  His newly edited two-volume edition of Churchill’s The River War is forthcoming.  Thoughts and Adventures by Winston Churchill, his highly accessible collection of essays originally published in the 1930s, was republished in 2009 by ISI Books, with a new introduction by Professor Muller.

Other faculty members participating in the institute will be:

Piers Brendon is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and between 1995 and 2001 was Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre.  Author of more than a dozen books, including Winston Churchill: A Brief Life (1987), The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (2000), and The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 (2007), Brendon writes widely for the press and has contributed to many historical documentaries. He has explored the fascinating relationship of World War II allies Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.  To accompany our reading of Franklin and Winston, Dr. Brendon will critically examine the mythology of the wartime relationship and its echoes in the present century.

David Dilks was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull, England, from 1991 to 1999, and previously was Professor of International History at the University of Leeds for more than twenty years.  As a young man, he worked for a number of those who had been close to Sir Winston, including Sir Anthony Eden, Mr. Harold Macmillan, and Sir Alexander Cadogan. Dilks served as president of the international Committee for the History of the Second World War from 1992 to 2000 and is author of numerous books and articles.  He has completed work on the second volume of the authorized biography of Neville Chamberlain.  He is author of The Great Dominion: Winston Churchill in Canada, 1900-1954 (2005).

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Sir Max Hastings is an author, journalist, and broadcaster whose work has appeared in every British national newspaper. He contributes regularly to the Daily Mail, Sunday Times, and Financial Times.  He spent most of his early years as a foreign correspondent for BBC TV and the London Evening Standard, reporting eleven conflicts, notably including Vietnam and the 1982 South Atlantic war, which inspired Battle for the Falklands, the 1983 best-seller he wrote with Simon Jenkins.  He was editor, then editor-in-chief, of The Daily Telegraph from 1986 to 1995, and of the Evening Standard from 1996 to 2002.  He has published twenty-two books, of which the most recent are Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord, 1940-45 (2009), Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, 1944-45 (2004), and Nemesis: The Battle for Japan, 1944-45 (2007).

Richard Overy was educated at Caius College, Cambridge.  From 1980 to 2004 he taught at King’s College, London where he was made professor of Modern History in 1994.  He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (1977), Fellow of the British Academy (2000) and Fellow of King’s College (2003).  In 2001 he was awarded the Samuel Elliot Morison Prize of the Society for Military History for his contribution to the history of warfare.  In September 2004 he took up appointment as Professor of History at the University of Exeter where he serves as Director of the Centre for the Study of War, State and Society.  He is the author of more than twenty books, including The Inter-War Crisis, 1919-1939 (1994), Why the Allies Won (1995) and Bomber Command 1939-1945 (1997). His most recent book was published in 2009, ‘The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars ‘ (Allen Lane, 2009)

Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge.  Together with the Library of Congress, Packwood was chief organizer of the 2004 American exhibit “Churchill and the Great Republic” at the Library of Congress.  The world’s leading expert on Churchill documents, he has superintended the digitizing of the Churchill Archives and has arranged for publication of many Churchill documents online, where they are available to students, teachers, and researchers. In 2004, the Archives Centre, working with the Churchill Centre, contributed to the exhibition “Churchill and the Great Republic” at the Library of Congress: the exhibition website may be viewed at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/churchill/.

Kevin Theakston is Professor of British Government, University of Leeds, and a former Kennedy Scholar at Harvard University.  The author of six books, including Winston Churchill and the British Constitution, he will guide our inquiry into British politics and political history, for without a full understanding of it, one is at a loss to appreciate many of the driving forces in Churchill’s life story.  As Theakston notes, Churchill was born in 1874, just a few years after the franchise reforms of 1867: “Churchill witnessed the arrival of mass democracy during his lifetime and played a key role in its incorporation into the constitutional system of Parliament and monarchy which he had long celebrated.”

Participants will have an opportunity to speak informally with the Director and guest professors over shared meals and during unscheduled times.

The Institute Director will be assisted by Daniel N. Myers, Chief Operating and Financial Officer for The Churchill Centre, who will provide oversight of all logistical and administrative support for the Institute, including management of the budget, and Suzanne Sigman, Educational Programs Coordinator for the Centre, who will manage affairs on-site in coordination with the Churchill Archives Centre and Goodenough College.  Mrs. Sigman has, over the past five years, organized the Centre’s one-day seminars for high school teachers in over a dozen American cities.