JACKSON, Tenn. — Historian and author Sean McMeekin will speak at the 20th annual Carls-Schwerdfeger History Lecture SeriesOct. 3 at Union University.
McMeekin is professor of history at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He is an internationally recognized authority on early 20th-century East European and Eurasian history and is a prize-winning author of six history books, including “The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923,” which won the Arthur Goodzeit Book Award from the New York Military Affairs Symposium.
His book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” won the Norman B. Tomlinson Jr. Book Prize from the World War I Historical Association, and “The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power” received the 2011 Barbara Jelavich Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.
McMeekin graduated from Stanford University in 1996 and earned his master’s degree and doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. He also studied in Paris, Berlin and Moscow.
Prior to joining the Bard faculty in 2014, he taught at Koç University and Bilkent University in Turkey and at Yale University.
McMeekin will speak in the G.M. Savage Memorial Chapel at 7:15 p.m. on “The War of 1914: An Avoidable Catastrophe.” The lecture is free and open to the public.
