Biography

William I. Hitchcock is the James Madison Professor of History at the University of Virginia. His work and teaching focus on the global history of the 20th Century, in particular the era of the two world wars and the cold war.

He received his B.A. degree from Kenyon College in 1986 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1994, working under the supervision of Paul Kennedy. He taught at Yale for six years, and served as the Associate Director of International Security Studies there. He published France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe (UNC, 1998) and co-edited a volume with Paul Kennedy titled From War to Peace: Altered Strategic Landscapes in the 20th Century (Yale, 2000). He moved to Wellesley College in 1999, where he taught for five years, and then took a position as a dean and professor of history at Temple University in Philadelphia. After publishing The Struggle for Europe: The Turbulent History of a Divided Continent, 1945-present (Doubleday/Anchor, 2002), he went on to write about the experience of liberation at the close of World War II. His book, The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Free Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, a winner of the George Louis Beer Prize, and a Financial Times bestseller in the UK. In 2010, he moved to the University of Virginia. His most recent book is The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), which was a New York Times bestseller. He is now writing "FDR and the Dictators: Fascism, Democracy and the Awakening of America," which explores reactions in the United States to the rise of fascism in Europe from the 1920s to 1941.

He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia and is married to the Civil War historian Elizabeth R. Varon.

Ph.D. Advisees and Dissertation Topics

Mary Barton: The Early History of Counter-Terrorism, 1898-1937. (PhD 2016; Dept of Defense)

Kathleen Berggren: “Forging a Soldier-State Social Contract: Veterans in American Politics, 1919-1980.” (PhD 2016)

Vivien Chang: "Creating the Third World: Anticolonial Diplomacy and the NIEO, 1960-75." (PhD 2022; Yale ISS postdoc)

Michael De Groot: "Disruption: The Global Economy of the 1970s." (PhD 2017; Asst Prof, Univ Indiana)

Alexandra Evans: "Reagan's Middle East" (PhD 2018; RAND Corp.)

Matt Frakes:  Rogue States: Counterterrorism in the Reagan Years

Stephanie Freeman: Nuclear Abolitionism and the End of the Cold War, 1979-1991. (Ph.D. 2017; Asst Prof., Mississippi State Univ.)

Mina Lee: Korea and the Challenge of Nuclear Energy in the 1970s

Emily Needham: U.S.-German Cultural Relations

Timothy Sayle (Temple University): An International History of NATO, 1956-1968. (PhD 2013; Asst Prof., Univ of Toronto.)

Felix Zuber: Transatlantic Peace Movements in the 1980s

Audrius Rickus: Detente between Europe and the United States

Zejun Wang, U.S.-China Relations in Cold War

Justin Winokur: The Making of the U.S. Warfare State