James Sheehan

Class of Spring 2001

Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History

Stanford University

What It Means to be a State: A History of Sovereignty in 20th Century Europe

DaimlerChrysler Fellow James Sheehan has turned two previous fellowship years in Germany into major works: German History 1770-1866 (Oxford History of Modern Europe; Wissenschafskolleg zu Berlin) and Museums in the Modern Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Humboldt Prize). His Academy project, “What it Means to be a State: A History of Sovereignty in 20th Century Europe,” builds upon both his interest in the ways contemporary Europe is transforming itself and a conviction that at both the beginning and end of the last century.

James Sheehan began teaching modern European history at Stanford in 1979 and is now Dickason Professor in the Humanities, a senior fellow of the Institute for International Studies, and the Paul Davies Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He is the recipient of four teaching awards, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Humboldt Research Prize, and an NEH fellowship. Sheehan’s books include Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe; Museums in the German Art World: From the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism; German History, 1770-1866; and German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century. President of the American Historical Association in 2005, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a corresponding fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Orden pour le Mérite.