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Photo: Mike Minehan

Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History and Co-Chair, Department of German Studies, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee

J. P. Morgan Fellow - Class of Spring 2005


Helmut Walser Smith (BA, Cornell, 1984; PhD Yale, 1992) is the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of German Nationalism and Religious Conflict (Princeton, 1995), an exploration of the impact of religious division between Protestants and Catholics on the articulation of German. He has also edited works on the history of anti-Semitism, on cooperation and conflict between religious groups, and on the Holocaust and other genocides. His recent book The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (2002) recreates in micro-historical detail a ritual murder accusation in a Prussian town in the year 1900. The book received the Fraenkel Prize in contemporary history and was also listed by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best non-fiction works of 2002. It has since been translated into French, Dutch and German.

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