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Erez Manela Named Professor of History
Cambridge, Mass. - September 3, 2009 - Erez Manela, whose study of 20th-century international history ranges from Woodrow Wilson’s advocacy of self-determination in the 1910s to the eradication of smallpox in the 1970s, has been named professor of history in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, effective July 1, 2009.
Manela was previously Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History at Harvard, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2003.
“Professor Manela has quickly made a name for himself as one of today’s most inspiring leaders in the field of international history,” says Stephen Kosslyn, dean of social science in FAS. “He is a young scholar who has produced a fine first book and shows the intellect and appetite to write many more. Here on campus, we admire and appreciate his teaching and service, and are delighted that he will remain part of our community.”
Manela’s influential and award-winning first book, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2007), examines the pivotal period of 1918 and 1919, as World War I neared its end. Unlike other classic histories of this period, Manela’s concentrates on actors outside Europe, including Mahatma Gandhi, Mao Zedong, and the future Ho Chi Minh, focusing on the anticolonial movements they inspired or supported. The near-simultaneity of these protests, fed by President Woodrow Wilson’s advocacy of self-determination, led Manela to label this period “the Wilsonian Moment” in international history.
Central to this moment in history, Manela argues, was Wilson’s vision of international society. His calls for self-government, aimed primarily at the oppressed peoples of Europe, rapidly circulated via steamships, telegraphs, and newspapers to people elsewhere, fomenting resistance in Cairo, Delhi, Beijing, and Seoul. Manela traces the seminal months in 1918-19 when Wilson’s “international discourse of legitimacy” gave birth to “a movement away from empire and toward the self-determining nation-state as the organizing principle of governance in the non-European world.”
Manela’s current research examines the decade-long international collaboration that led to the 1977 eradication of an infectious disease that had been humanity’s most deadly for three millennia. This effort – the first successful campaign to wipe out any infectious disease – has been elided in many Cold War histories, but it represented a conspicuous example of superpower cooperation: The U.S. provided much of the funding for the effort, while the U.S.S.R. provided the bulk of the vaccine.
Manela is also currently at work co-editing a volume titled The Shock of the Global: The International History of the 1970s (Harvard University Press, 2010), which arose from an international conference Manela co-organized at Harvard last fall.
Manela earned a B.A. from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1997 and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 2003. At Yale, he received the Mary & Arthur Wright Prize for the best dissertation in non-European history and the John Addison Porter Prize for the best dissertation in any field. Among many other honors, he also received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2005.
Manela held the John M. Olin Fellowship in National Security at Harvard from 2002 to 2003. He joined Harvard as assistant professor of history in 2003, becoming the Dunwalke Associate Professor in 2007. He has served as a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.
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