James J. Sheehan, the Dickason Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University and an internationally recognized expert on the history of modern Europe, will present the first Verne Moore Lecture of the semester at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 2, in the Hawkins-Carlson Room of Rush Rhees Library on the University of Rochester's River Campus.
One of the pre-eminent specialists in modern German history, Sheehan will give a talk related to his forthcoming book, The Rise of the Civilian State in Europe, 1945-2006, examining relationships among European states and between the states and their citizens in the second half of the 20th century. Sheehan has written widely on the history and politics of Germany for scholarly journals such as the International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, and his book German Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century is considered among the major works in the field.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society, Sheehan is a past president of the American Historical Association. Among his honors and awards are the Officer's Cross in the Order of Merit, presented by the Federal Republic of Germany, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin.
Sheehan is also professor of modern European history at Stanford, where he has been on the faculty since 1979 and won several teaching awards.
The Verne Moore Lectures are sponsored by the Department of History and have been funded by a gift from the University alumnus Verne Moore, Class of 1950, since 1996. For more information, call (585) 275-2052.